Copyright @2017 CodeNewsWire "News coders can use", dateline 1 April 2017
Wikileaks dumped its latest batch of revelations on the world on April 1, 2017, this time focusing on the world of software programming. From dishing out the dirt on the origins of the Internet (think: Area 51) to emails candidly deriding JSON as nothing more than the latest attempt (XML being the last one) to avoid carefully designing your database, this trove of previously secret secrets is sure to keep Silicon Valley gossiping for months.
But buried deep within the 2.5 trillion byte download is evidence of a conspiracy so vast, so unbelievable, so extraordinary, that it is hard, well, to believe.
But if it came from Wikileaks it must be true. And that conspiracy was built around - and is maintained around - this incredible bit:
Wikileaks has, apparently, two words for you:
It is well-known to practitioners of PL/SQL that there are several documented indeterminate behaviors in the language (which some, cynically, try to brush aside as merely "undocumented"). For example, the state of a variable that you SELECT INTO will be indeterminate if the statement raises TOO_MANY_ROWS. It seems to usually have the data from the first row selected in it, but this cannot be trusted.
Developer responses in the modern age (aka, the Age of Apps) to this indeterminacy have been to shrug and get on with life.
But Wikileaks has discovered minutes of a secret meeting taking place in 1991 in the office of the CEO of Oracle, attended by none other than James Gosling (creator of Java), Linus Torvald (inventor of Linux and Git), Brendan Eich (creator of JavaScript) and several others whose identity were masked in the minutes.
At this meeting, Larry Ellison disclosed that his engineers had designed PL/SQL to exploit quantum entanglement (which manifest as "indeterminacies") as a pathway into multiverse threading. The result was a programming language so elegant, so powerful, so subtle and so mysterious that it can be used to implement anything and everything.
The assembled experts were blown away. And thoroughly convinced by a 5 minute demonstration by Ellison, which involved, among other things, using PL/SQL to look into the box containing Schroedinger's Cat to tell us precisely and unambiguously whether or not it is alive. Or was. Or could be. Whatever.
The fear from the crowded meeting was evident, but Ellison put those fears to rest. "Don't worry, fellas," he was recorded as telling them. "We are not going to announce this news to the world. It will be too destabilizing. Instead, we've built a quantum-level API that you can all use to build whatever you want. And if you insist on continuing to use C, that's OK, too, because we've used the PL/SQL tachyon exploit to travel back in time and re-implement C in PL/SQL as well."
In the end, all these language experts agreed: there was too much to gain from PL/SQL to ignore it. But the world could never know. And so it was decided: Oracle would continue to promote PL/SQL as a database programming language, special-purpose and not very object-oriented. Purveyors of other languages would continue to make fun of PL/SQL and tout their own latest and greatest innovations.
CodeNewsWire reached out to Edward Snowden, whistleblower supreme (or arch-traitor, depending on your point of view), regarding this incredible revelation. "What?" he replied. "This is news? I thought that was in my dump from the NSA and CIA. All the best Agency developers write nothing but pure PL/SQL, on hopped-up quantum computers. And they use edition-based redefinition."
Steven Feuerstein, author of way too many books on PL/SQL, was hit harder by this news than most. On the one hand, he was pleased to hear about the enhanced power of PL/SQL. On the other hand, as he expressed it on his Twitter account, "How could I have missed something as big as this? And could I get another book out of it?"
Determined to gain insight into what really went on - and is going on, and will go on, all at the same time - he tracked down Linus Torvald to a heavily fortified Git Repo in a Helsinki rave club. Torvald wouldn't open the door, but he did shout the following: "Go away! Linux is mine, all mine! I was never at that meeting! The cat is dead, always dead, in all the universes I've visited using my PL/SQL transporter. Oh, crap."
Now the world knows.
It's all PL/SQL, all the time.
But don't worry, you can live in denial, and keep on programming in JavaScript or Go or Went or Ruby or Scala or Java.
Just show some respect.
Wikileaks dumped its latest batch of revelations on the world on April 1, 2017, this time focusing on the world of software programming. From dishing out the dirt on the origins of the Internet (think: Area 51) to emails candidly deriding JSON as nothing more than the latest attempt (XML being the last one) to avoid carefully designing your database, this trove of previously secret secrets is sure to keep Silicon Valley gossiping for months.
But buried deep within the 2.5 trillion byte download is evidence of a conspiracy so vast, so unbelievable, so extraordinary, that it is hard, well, to believe.
But if it came from Wikileaks it must be true. And that conspiracy was built around - and is maintained around - this incredible bit:
All modern programming languages, from Java to JavaScript, Scala to Go, are actually all implemented in the Oracle PL/SQL language. Oh, and Linux, too.You are probably laughing to yourself, right now, right? PL/SQL? That straightforward - and some might argue, rather archaic - procedural language, apparently useful only for managing transactions in the Oracle Database? How could you possibly implement Java in it? Linux? JavaScript?
Wikileaks has, apparently, two words for you:
It is well-known to practitioners of PL/SQL that there are several documented indeterminate behaviors in the language (which some, cynically, try to brush aside as merely "undocumented"). For example, the state of a variable that you SELECT INTO will be indeterminate if the statement raises TOO_MANY_ROWS. It seems to usually have the data from the first row selected in it, but this cannot be trusted.
Developer responses in the modern age (aka, the Age of Apps) to this indeterminacy have been to shrug and get on with life.
But Wikileaks has discovered minutes of a secret meeting taking place in 1991 in the office of the CEO of Oracle, attended by none other than James Gosling (creator of Java), Linus Torvald (inventor of Linux and Git), Brendan Eich (creator of JavaScript) and several others whose identity were masked in the minutes.
At this meeting, Larry Ellison disclosed that his engineers had designed PL/SQL to exploit quantum entanglement (which manifest as "indeterminacies") as a pathway into multiverse threading. The result was a programming language so elegant, so powerful, so subtle and so mysterious that it can be used to implement anything and everything.
The assembled experts were blown away. And thoroughly convinced by a 5 minute demonstration by Ellison, which involved, among other things, using PL/SQL to look into the box containing Schroedinger's Cat to tell us precisely and unambiguously whether or not it is alive. Or was. Or could be. Whatever.
The fear from the crowded meeting was evident, but Ellison put those fears to rest. "Don't worry, fellas," he was recorded as telling them. "We are not going to announce this news to the world. It will be too destabilizing. Instead, we've built a quantum-level API that you can all use to build whatever you want. And if you insist on continuing to use C, that's OK, too, because we've used the PL/SQL tachyon exploit to travel back in time and re-implement C in PL/SQL as well."
In the end, all these language experts agreed: there was too much to gain from PL/SQL to ignore it. But the world could never know. And so it was decided: Oracle would continue to promote PL/SQL as a database programming language, special-purpose and not very object-oriented. Purveyors of other languages would continue to make fun of PL/SQL and tout their own latest and greatest innovations.
CodeNewsWire reached out to Edward Snowden, whistleblower supreme (or arch-traitor, depending on your point of view), regarding this incredible revelation. "What?" he replied. "This is news? I thought that was in my dump from the NSA and CIA. All the best Agency developers write nothing but pure PL/SQL, on hopped-up quantum computers. And they use edition-based redefinition."
Steven Feuerstein, author of way too many books on PL/SQL, was hit harder by this news than most. On the one hand, he was pleased to hear about the enhanced power of PL/SQL. On the other hand, as he expressed it on his Twitter account, "How could I have missed something as big as this? And could I get another book out of it?"
Determined to gain insight into what really went on - and is going on, and will go on, all at the same time - he tracked down Linus Torvald to a heavily fortified Git Repo in a Helsinki rave club. Torvald wouldn't open the door, but he did shout the following: "Go away! Linux is mine, all mine! I was never at that meeting! The cat is dead, always dead, in all the universes I've visited using my PL/SQL transporter. Oh, crap."
Now the world knows.
It's all PL/SQL, all the time.
But don't worry, you can live in denial, and keep on programming in JavaScript or Go or Went or Ruby or Scala or Java.
Just show some respect.
You had me until "a 5 minute demonstration by Ellison." At that point, the satire sun rose high in the sky.
ReplyDeleteHa! What's funny about that is I kinda figured that was the MOST believable part - Larry is famous for doing demos in his keynotes.
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