It's The People, Stupid!
The pattern of lead engineer jumping off the Java train continues with Chet Haase, the lead Java client architect, joining Adobe's Flex SDK team.
Eric Burke, over there at Stuff That Happens.com, as usual, has the in depth analysis:
([Update] Eric has since toned down the original wording of the comment and withdrew two out of three frames of the comic, and issued an apology. I have updated my quote accordingly.)
Eric Burke: This is a real XXXX in the XXXX...
Of course, Adobe doesn't think so:
James Ward, commenting on Eric's Comic: Adobe is not trying to kill anyone or anything. We are always looking for great engineers. Chet is a great engineer and we are really happy to have him on board.
Instead of getting all depressed, let me salvage the situation and turn this situation into a fun little Sunday Java People Quiz:
Q: For each of the following former Sun engineers, discuss the importance of their contributions to the Java platform, what prompted them to leave the Java team, and which company, if any hired them away?
- Arthur van Hoff
- Alan Baratz
- Patrick Naughton
- The original CAFEBABE
- Calvin Austin
- Joshua Bloch
- Neal Gafter
- Gilad Bracha
- Peter van der Ahe
- Graham Hamilton
- Dick Wall (or one of the other Java Posses, I can't tell them apart)
- Bill Joy
- Ken Arnold
- Mary, the lady who use to give out Friday Free Stuff
- (Add more in the comments)
The point? Java has survived in the face of all these public high profile separations. It will live on past this one.
Re: It's The People, Stupid!
From Neal Gafter's Blogger Profile: He was previously a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he co-designed and implemented the Java language features in releases 1.4 through 5.0.