<story><title>Judge Alsup learns to code and schools Oracle</title><url>https://plus.google.com/110412141990454266397/posts/fk5VXPpiQZR</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jmillikin</author><text>Article appears to be a mis-statment of the actual quote (from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120515120106322&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120515120106322&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  &amp;#62; Judge: We heard the testimony of Mr. Bloch. I couldn&apos;t
  &amp;#62; have told you the first thing about Java before this
  &amp;#62; problem. I have done, and still do, a significant amount
  &amp;#62; of programming in other languages. I&apos;ve written blocks of
  &amp;#62; code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do
  &amp;#62; it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that
  &amp;#62; when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an
  &amp;#62; accident. There&apos;s no way you could say that was speeding
  &amp;#62; them along to the marketplace. You&apos;re one of the best
  &amp;#62; lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of
  &amp;#62; argument? 
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
It sounds like the judge is saying that he has written code before, just not in Java. Presumably this was some time ago, before he decided to become a judge.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>6ren</author><text>So he was playing dumb earlier for the benefit of the jury - to make the advocates spell out their case clearly. This is what he was responding to:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  &amp;#62; This copying allowed them to use fewer resources and accelerate that. Suppose they
  &amp;#62; accelerated it two days. They&apos;re making $3 million a day now [...] If you just get
  &amp;#62; one or two days&apos; acceleration, that&apos;s $6 million
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
This is a good point; it&apos;s common to underestimate how long it takes to code something. And time to market is often strategically crucial - that is, productivity isn&apos;t just efficient, but can be the difference between success and failure. rangeCheck is trivial; but writing, testing, debugging, naming and documenting take time.  A trivial typo bug in rangeCheck can cost a disproportionate amount of time - and it&apos;s amplified here, when rangeCheck was used to test other code. (Who shall unit test the unit tests?)&lt;p&gt;To answer Groklaw&apos;s final question as to why Alsup couldn&apos;t decide on API copyrightability yet, he clearly said he needed to do a lot of reading. He not only has to decide according to law, he is in effect creating law, since this specific issue hasn&apos;t been decided earlier.  His ruling has wider significance than just this particular case.  Future potential litigants will read his ruling, and will avoid court if it&apos;s clear who would win. Although he is only one judge and so his precedent won&apos;t be binding on a full bench/higher court, those judges would also carefully read his judgment. He&apos;d better get it right, not only in the result, but in the reasoning, and integrating it with related cases.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s great that Groklaw is making these transcripts - because the court is a public institution, I think the official transcripts should be available (and why not video too? The emphasis in oral argument sometimes isn&apos;t captured in a transcript.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Judge Alsup learns to code and schools Oracle</title><url>https://plus.google.com/110412141990454266397/posts/fk5VXPpiQZR</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jmillikin</author><text>Article appears to be a mis-statment of the actual quote (from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120515120106322&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120515120106322&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  &amp;#62; Judge: We heard the testimony of Mr. Bloch. I couldn&apos;t
  &amp;#62; have told you the first thing about Java before this
  &amp;#62; problem. I have done, and still do, a significant amount
  &amp;#62; of programming in other languages. I&apos;ve written blocks of
  &amp;#62; code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do
  &amp;#62; it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that
  &amp;#62; when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an
  &amp;#62; accident. There&apos;s no way you could say that was speeding
  &amp;#62; them along to the marketplace. You&apos;re one of the best
  &amp;#62; lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of
  &amp;#62; argument? 
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
It sounds like the judge is saying that he has written code before, just not in Java. Presumably this was some time ago, before he decided to become a judge.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gambler</author><text>Seems like this is a good answer to those asking &quot;how could learning to code help X to do their political job&quot;. That&apos;s how. By giving them some basic sense of proportions when it comes to software.</text></comment>