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Gosling Returns To The Java Fold
MemRaven writes "In an article on CNet News, James Gosling reveals that he's returning to the Java Tools group at Sun. The article touches briefly on the Eclipse situation as well as some vague statements about what he's doing in the future. Since he's been gone from the Java fold for a while, this might spell some definite changes in how Sun treats its stepchild."
Let's see what Gosling has done:
He created a commercial Emacs clone, which didn't particularly ingratiate him to the open source community.
He created a commercial window system called NeWS and tried to kill X11 with it, but that was a commercial failure, never really worked anyway, and was largely based on other people's technology.
Then he built a simplistic language for programming consumer devices, but that project failed miserably as well. Only when they put it out on the Internet for free, claimed that they were going to make it "open", and promised to create a browser based application delivery platform did it take off--not because there was anything technical novel about it, but because people wanted to believe in browser-based programming (sadly, Sun has pretty much failed to deliver on all of that). Most of the hard work to make Java a success was done by the JIT developers and IBM.
These days, he seems to be porting over code highlighting and some other features from Emacs to NetBeans.
Sorry, but if this is a "personality story", maybe someone can explain to me why I should be excited about it. At Sun, Guy Steele would be my vote for one of the most competent people they have. But Gosling? Why?
there's nothing Sun can do about it. Gosling's comments about a developer perspective says it all. This is why eclipse has gained such a great following. I know from first hand, a large percentage of jakarta developers are strickly using eclipse now. If you ask around, the Tomcat developers for the most part use eclipse. Many other jakarta projects use eclipse exclusively.