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What Oracle Wants You To Believe

Let’s start with a basic component of any language:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

You’re looking at the fundamental building blocks of a written language—a series of symbols intended to represent discrete components used to communicate ideas. We can add extra symbols into the mix, which can be used to separate and organize these components:

!, ;:’”?

Now we have the ability to construct sentences. With sentences it should be possible to effectively communicate ideas. Let’s try:

tfrgk id. Uppxq; tmno “ffwnk”

… well. Something is still missing. The problem is that randomly putting these things together means nothing, because we don’t have a point of reference that makes any sense.

What we need is an Application Programming Interface: a specification that will define how a language can be used to actually communicate useful ideas, commands, and information. You know what would be really useful? If these letters and symbols followed a specification that mapped out to the language I use every day when I speak.

That’s it! We’ll create an API that takes all these symbols and applies rules to them, so that if they are arranged in certain ways we’ll be able to represent spoken language. So for example, we can take three symbols and put them together, and based on the rules of the API that will mean “dog:”

dog

And we can add punctuation to further delineate between the meaning of some of these constructs. For example:

A panda eats: shoots and leaves.

Will have an entirely different meaning from:

A panda eats, shoots, and leaves.

Thanks to this API, which I’m going to call “The English Language,” it is suddenly possible for me to use these symbols to communicate complicated ideas with other people.

With the API I have a language.

Without the API, all I have is an alphabet.

Oracle wants you to believe that they can copyright Java’s equivalent of the English language.

But they have no problem with you using the alphabet. Good luck doing anything with it.

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