Slashdot Mirror
Interview With James Gosling
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"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
James has a homepage here, for your perusal. There are some really interesting things on it, like the fact he is Canadian and likes pies in Bill Gate's face to name a few.
So the JDC interviewed James Gosling. Surely he [has] contributed to the JDC and has a log in, thus making him a part of the JDC collective...
Next week on Slashdot: Taco interviews himself.
-... ---
I myself code just about everything in a server-sided web application. I can extend this to the desktop using Java, but to date have not seen a need. I know it takes more time this way than to fire up Visual Basic and create an application that way, but I don't run Windows, and my programs work on just about any system.
As for the imbedded market, Java has the capabilities, but I don't know if developers are going to embrace it much with licensing issues, code changes between releases, and the increasing number of non-Java tools that effectively get the job done.
Five years? Java will be with us, and there will be more of it out there. That might really be its peak usage before it falls like RPG, COBOL and other great languages that revolutionized computer program development.
Click here or here.
Use the BigDecimal class. It's standard and handles any size floating point numbers. Not quite as good as the Cobol version, but you can always write your own class if you are that picky.
Sorry, Java is more based on C then on Cobol.
This interview is worth reading if only to get a laugh out of the way Sun's marketroids obviously sanitized it. In at attempt to make the text of the interview (which is just a transcript of a spoken exchange, after all) comply with Sun's trademark guidelines, they ended up with sentences like this:
So, personally, you could delete [the] JDBC [API] from [the] J2SE [platform] and it would not affect any code that I've ever written.
And this:
That would make [the] Java [programming language] much more flexible.
And this:
Is it possible to submit the Java [technology] bytecode specification to a standards body like ECMA [and the like]?
Sheesh. This interview was brought to you by the letters "[" and "]".
From the article:
JDC: Is it possible to submit the Java [technology] bytecode specification to a standards body like ECMA [and the like]?
JG: Well, we actually tried to do that; to submit it to ECMA. And that exploded and turned into a rather bizarre episode. And actually, after that exploded, ECMA did an internal investigation and published a report, which is very interesting reading.
Does anyone know what he's talking about? I saw this interview a while ago and have looked around in vain for the report he mentions. This would certainly be interesting, especially if, as I somehow suspect, Microsoft did something to prevent Java from becoming a standard.
The interview was very short and I did not find much information. Here are some related links:
4 7_ STO69691,00.html -- on .NET and J2EE
v iews/james_ gosling.html
d efault.asp
g os ling/
http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV
Gosling on netbeans -- (03/2002)
http://www.netbeans.org/articles/inter
An old interview from 2000 -- more on java http://www.devx.com/judgingjava/articles/gosling/
Another from 1999 --
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/features/
S
I think [that] the [person who acted in the capacity of the] editor [of this article] who keeps [repeatedly] butting in [to the questions and answers] for no [descernable] reason [or benefit] should just shut [the f*ck] up.
Well, I like java, but it's still special purpose to me. It excels in ecommerce and dynamic web stuff. It may someday excel at distributed systems since it will be easy to move code around various devices on a network.
It's not a general purpose platform or language, imho, however. But there is one thing that would make it that way... hardware VMs... which would be JavaMs, of course, since they wouldn't be virtual.
Where are the processors that run the java code on the chip directly?
-pyrrho
It runs on linux too!
I may be a little biased though...
I don't fear computers, I fear the lack of them. -I. Asimov
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. Why is Java so damn slow?
2. Why do so many Java developers get so upset when you point out how damn slow Java really is?
3. Why is it so much fun to pick on Java developers when there really are slower languages out there?
4. If you could make Java fast, would you voluntarily leave it slow just so we could give Java developers apoplexy by mentioning how fast even PHP is for certain tasks?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
JDC: I'd like to see more tools that enhance developer productivity, we have Unified Modeling Language (UML) modeling tools, and wizards to help us generate code. Can we tie these together better?
Another way to enhance productivity is to manipulate the Java source code itself (rather than generate code from the outside.) A good example of tool doing just that is Moka. In short, Moka is a Java-to-Java translator which allows you to extend Java in many interesting ways. For instance, there is a plug-in that allows you to remove any method or class whose name begins with 'debug'. There are other examples on the web page. I believe it's easy to use, and it makes up for various shortcomings of the language itself.
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
The March 2000 JavaWorld has an interview with ECMA officials that, as Gosling says, makes for interesting reading:
"They just don't want to give up control" of Java, said Jan van den Beld, secretary-general of ECMA. "It is 100 percent my opinion that Sun is publicly saying they want to make Java a standard, but privately not making it happen."
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.
2. They're not upset; that's the sound of Java developers rolling around in the large piles of money they make writing software that people actually use.
3. Because it's easier to nitpick the best product than it is to find all of the memory leaks and bad pointer refs in the C++ code written by l33t hax0rs.
4. Yes; if you can amuse your inferiors at no cost to yourself, why not bring some joy into their sad lives?
-jon
Remember Amalek.
You used punch cards only 15 years ago? (I'm assuming you didn't mean way "over 15 years ago".) I was in the last CS class I know of that used them at UIUC (doing FORTRAN on an IBM 360, I think) before they went TSO 27+ years ago, and I just assumed that was the last place anywhere to use that (at least in the first or second world). Bad assumption?
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
It may be on the site somewhere, but I sure didn't find any cost or license information at your site. Not a promissing start from my viewpoint.
Also, it wasn't clear whether or not it was entirely aimed at embedded systems, or whether it supported some kind of Swing-equivalent library. Or, perhaps Swing was what you were supposed to use. But would it work? You mention that you have your own JVM, but you don't say anything about "binary compatible" etc., and even awt contains a lot of compiled code.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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
for(int *p=0;;*(p++)=0);
:)
The equivilent code in java would be:
Integer a = NULL;
int b = a.toInt();
Java uses references, not pointers. The difference is twofold: one, if you attempt to dereference a null pointer in java using the code above, you get a well-handled exception which either launches an error routine defined by the programmer or causes the program to terminate politely (as opposed to the messy crash you will get if you pull this in C++). Secondly you cannot do math with references-- with a reference, you can point it to something another reference already points to, or you can point it to a new object, or you can point it to NULL. With a pointer, you can just point it to any old thing anywhere in memory, or even just iterate over memory like the code at the top of this post does, and when you read the any-old-thing in question you'll just get garbage-- but your program will *think* it's reading a valid value, and operate on the garbage as if it was something important. Sometimes this results in catastrophe.
The downside to java's way of doing things is it's a bit simplistic-- you cannot have references to ints, floats, or other "base types" unless you put them inside a "wrapper object". This simplifies coding and reading but is a bit limiting at times.
Note, for the record, in C++, the term "null pointer" generally refers to any pointer that points to garbage-- in practice it doesn't always refer to NULL, which is memory address 0. Perhaps you should read some of the other documents on the "everything2" site i link above-- it has lots of good definitions of things. Hopefully that helps a little
super ugly ultraman
(Yes, I can use Google, but that didn't seem to be much use. Oh, but did find this googlewhack while trying to get info.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
PHP
The thing is, Java's strength is it's very weakness. Java is a platform neutral by design, so it's rather clunky when compared to a platform specific language. You won't ever see a game written in Java, not because Java is slow, but because you can't use Direct X with it(or whatever platform specific lib you want).
I think Java is going to own the embedded market. A cell phone company can create Java software and it can happily switch around the cell phone hardware as much as they want and still use the same single piece of software.
Palm Pilots are still popular for this same reason. There are tons of Palm apps that run on them and the new Pilots are software compatible with the older ones.
.NET appears to be different than Java in that it makes no attempt at being platform neutral, rather it tries to be language nuetral. Python.NET, VB.NET, C++.NET all compile down to the same CLR. And a VB.NET developer can use Python.NET libraries.
I think this will dominate the application market.
Java does not have a built-in arbitrary precision rational type
Nor does COBOL. Perhaps you're thinking of Scheme?
Anyway, COBOL users that have a clue (e.g. the UK Revenue Service) use 128 bit integers for monetary amounts - decimals are, er, pointless.
Have you noticed that the syntax of Java is rather familiar (C++), and the semantics are not very new either (Simula 67)?
Whereas the VM is remarkably innovative - bytecode verifier, security domains, JIT compilers, advanced GCs.
Care to rethink those thoughts?
Which is fine until you get handed a linked list instead, and your algorithm goes from N to N^2. I like to write iterators like this:
for(Iterator i=list.iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {
SomeClass obj = (SomeClass)i.next();
}
So there is a temporary iterator object, but it's only in the scope of the for loop so it doesn't really bother me. I'm actually more annoyed with the cast, hopefully the generics in 1.5 will take care of that.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
ARM's jazelle core and others (do a google search or go to SUN's website) do this and supposedly it is already being implemented by mobile phone makers.
Every interview I read on James Gossling, I read "how people are doing all sorts of exiting things on the desktop with it" and some other stuff such as how it is getting into "the embedded space". (what is embedded space? Did an astronaut get some vacum in abottle and bring it back with him?).
At the same time I read how SUN marvelousy manages to fuck things up with respect to their favourite language on the client side. Granted, it is huge on the e-commerce side of things, but things like JSP are too complex for simple backend applications that are far more easily handled in PHP or ASP. The mobile market seems to like it and it might become big there too, given that ARM and others are making processor core that handle bytecode natively, but that's not yet a given.
What stresses me is that, from the beginning, SUN mishandled Java and played into MS' hands for a number of reasons:
1.When it first came out it became very popular very quickly because of it's ability to provide pixelated aliased dancing Dukes and and sound to web pages. However Sun never bothered to push the point and try to improve performance and load times. People got very tired of seeing pixelated images floating across the screen that took minutes in some cases to load on early modems. They just sat there on their butts and ignored the fact that AWT was hideous, ungainly, and in no way worked very well across platforms (I mean on the Mac or Unix for example) and lacked important controls.
2.One of the things that played into MS' hands was the above and the fact that SUN made Java native interaction very difficult or at least non-trivial to implement, so that people who would have otherwise been able to make GUI controls and interface in C/C++ were put off having to slog through JNI. Along came MS with their JRI (or whatever it was called) which enabled all the hordes of MS developers to easily call MFC and other Win32 stuff directly from the classes. It was an easy picking and whose fault was it. It was or should have been obvious that MS would try to scupper anything that anyone else did (Custom ActiveX never became very popular but it did serve the purpose of making more FUD enter the arena) and the need for easy native access was defintely there. I know that it might have neccesitated changes in the security model but SUN didn't listen or was too confident or just too plain stupid when you look at the ugliness of their desktop for example.
3.Eventually they did listen and came up with Swing, which was so slow on machines of the time (ever run the Swing demo stuff on a 223MHz x86?) that it put off many companies and developers, who just carried on using VB because it was a no contest in terms of GUI response. And this although Swing looked very good.
Why did SUN ignore all the compaints? Why did they make native access so difficult? Why didn't they just improve AWT? Why didn't they try to look at it from a consumer point of view, which is what all those people watching the moronic applets of time were. Applets have all but dissapeared on the web and 99% of interactive shit is done with Flash today. Why didn't they try a trick from the MS book and try to implement things like the JVM starting up on boot or browser launch to make Applets start faster? Why did SUN make such a huge fuss of MS ignoring Java in XP when they couldn't even be bothered to make a marketing push for, IMO, some pretty neat stuff like WebStart?(who actually uses this?)
MS may be an abuse monopoly but SUN has it's head in the clouds up with the bosses of big banks etc and seems too dumb to try to see things from a consumer point of view.
(Sorry for the rant. I think they need it.)
"Copy-pasted" and then obviously modified it so that it would compile in C - such as not making a class out of the whole app, not passing a String[] to main(), not having main be "static" etc. :) Nothing essential such as the actual algorithm and math code was touched, however.
What about /. interview of Gosling? Surely people
here have Java related issues and questions...
With C, C++, all using Signal does possibly what kind of things that the operating system is about to kill you for, and gives you the chance to exit will your head still on your shoulders, before the operating system goes ahead and decapitates your program.
... } catch(NullPoinerException npe) { ... } and recover completely from dereferenceing a null pointer. Furthermore, you can recover and remain in the same block of code, whereas handling a signal requires registering a different function. And if you want, you can catch(Throwable t){} and recover from *anything* if you so wish.
You are obviously a retard. You can try {
I'd call that well handled... or maybe you were being sarcastic?
minatrix.com
Go there and take a look at least. It's a java gamin g site on the basis of applets. Register (horror!) and take a look at the games. There are two 3D games last time I looked and a host of single and multiplayer tetris, galaxis and backgammon knockoffs etc.
This site is very interesting for a number of reasons:
1.It is immensely popular. When you play a game a window of all the other users online at the time pops up, and it blew me over to be honest.
2.The games look extremely good visually, are based on simple premises that make them adictive and are playable even on slower hardware.
3.It works best in Explorer's MS JVM of all things. JDK1.2 Browsers are not supported well and don't even work in some cases. This raises the question as to where they will go now that MS has dropped having it's own JVM in XP?
sumea
Go here and see what you can do with a well written ava 3D engine that needs no hardware acceleration. Take note of the site design. It makes an impression on consumers.