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Interview With James Gosling

Posted by Hemos on from the learning-more-about-hjava dept.

Def Mango Raygun writes "There is an interview with James Gosling of Sun. He talks about some language features and why they happened. It's short, but informative"

11 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Where will Java be in five years? by TWR · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Um, you are aware of a little think called J2EE, right? Java on the server is pretty much where the action is: servlets, JSPs, EJBs, JDBC, JMS.

    What are you using for web development?

    -jon

    --

    Remember Amalek.

  2. Java features by ilyag · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I can't say I found a lot of information in the article... Still, here are some questions about the design of the language:

    1) Why are classes like Integer so weird? It is such a pain to, for example, increment them... Change of this would conflict with absence of operator overloading, true (I don't like that too much either, but at least can imagine why it's (not) there). However, why not make them magical like String's "+"?

    2) Several times I got caught on the fact that there is no way to pass an int by reference. And I don't like Integer (see aboive)...

    3) One (public) class per file. This especially bugs me with small interfaces. Such a waste of screen space and disk space (each file takes up 4k on the file system)... Why not allow to put a hierarchy of interfaces (and, preferably, classes) in one file?

    This wasn't intended to be troll, even if it looks and feels like one. ;)

    --
    I like '...' (and (nested) parens)...

    1. Re:Java features by GuyZero · · Score: 3, Insightful

      3) One (public) class per file. This especially bugs me with small interfaces. Such a waste of screen space and disk space (each file takes up 4k on the file system)... Why not allow to put a hierarchy of interfaces (and, preferably, classes) in one file?

      Well, this is really a classloader limitation... there's no restriction to loading classes from a databse, across the network, from your back pocket, etc, as long as you've got an appropriate classloader.

      Besides, there are those things called JAR files... have you used Java much?

  3. Re:Java as ECMA standard? by Tony-A · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Them as lives by the crystal ball shall learn to eat ground glass.
    Nevertheless, I'll hazard a guess.
    There is the old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committe. Java is Sun's "baby" and if left to the vagaries of the standards body, somebody, sometime, somehow would manage to sabotage the integrity of the design. It's gotta be real easy to change Java to be more "programmer friendly", a la Virul Basic, and lose the integrity in the process.

  4. Preemptive "faster than C" counter-troll by Ars-Fartsica · · Score: 3, Insightful

    For all of the posters who are going to respond with "Java can possibly be faster than C"...well, a color television could also possibly spontaneously appear at the event horizon of a black hole, but that doesn't mean that this actually ever happens.

  5. Re:Sun come back please! You are in DANGER! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
    Sun is doomed already. The reason: they don't have a viable business model. They've flopped back and forth between being a software company with open hardware to a hardware company with open software. Right now, they claim to have both open hardware and software. Their pushing Java and it's descendents, without a clue how they are going to derive revenue from it. Sparc, once a neat idea, is several generations behind the state of the art. Sun workstations are simply an order of magnitude behind a new x86 box running Linux in terms of price/performance. And IBM is eating their lunch in the high end server market. Personally, I can't understand why they're still in business. If they can't find something real soon that they can a) do better than anyone else, and b) actually make money doing, I'd expect them to go the way Osbourne, Kaypro, DEC, Tektronics, and all those other tech companies whose time has come and gone. (Of course, HP/Compaq may soon be added to this list if they don't figure out REAL SOON what business they are in.)


    It's the Business Model, Stupid!

  6. Does anyone understand... by Glock27 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    the dynamic that has made Java grow exponentially in 'real' software development, and become the dominant teaching language versus the constant bashing it receives here on Slashdot and among OSS people?

    Java is actually very good, and yes, very fast. I fail to understand why anyone would prefer Microsoft's poor imitation. Java is still growing very fast and getting better all the time.

    Ignore it at your peril. Or better yet, just laugh at it...that is until you're in the unemployment line because you don't know it.

    --
    Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
    Score: -1 100% Flamebait
    1. Re:Does anyone understand... by pohl · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I don't understand it, but I'm not going to let that stop me from responding. It seems to me that OSS and Java are natural allies. It's the only language that I know of that would allow me to be a debian user in the middle of a business that loves nothing more than the phrase "we're a windows shop". I can develop on linux, use the operating system that I love, and deliver on anything that we need to. While there are some OSS languages out there that provide the the WORA property, they're lacking in various things like the bytecode delivery model, the security model, the J2EE model for scaling up applications. Plus the weight of a diverse and active industry helps to sell it to management. Maybe those who bash it feel that they are safely out of the woods with respect to Microsoft's control of the industry, but I for one don't feel safe yet.

      --

      The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...

    2. Re:Does anyone understand... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      It wasn't that long ago that Sun refused to port their tools and the JVM to Linux.

  7. Re:better codes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    "try getting the absolute value of an Integer"

    int x = y;
    if(x 0)
    x *= -1;
    System.out.println("The absolute value of x is " + x);


    Call me old fashion, But I just use the java.lang.Math.abs(int) methods myself.
  8. Re:What the heck is autoboxing? by Steveftoth · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Not really, because you have problems like what gosling said with identity, so you say
    int i = 1;
    Integer I = 1;
    does i == I?

    casting a float to an int ( and back ) is completly different as when you cast a float to an int, the number will probably change.
    3.999999 -> int -> 3
    should it goto 4? probably, it should be rounded.
    but autoboxing is supposed to keep the value of the original type.

    Regardless I'm not too sure how this will help performance much.
    The feature that I want to see added to java is that I want to be able for the java vm to create objects on the stack. Then if they get assigned to a member pointer, get promoted to the heap. This way you could keep objects on the stack where they could be easily collected when the function that created them ends scope.