Gosling on Computing

CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has Eric Allman (creator of Sendmail) interviewing James Gosling (creator of Java) and the conversation covers many aspects of computing today, including the state of security, comparisons of languages and OSs, and the future of virtual machines. 'At the lowest level, you have to know that the boundaries around the piece of software are completely known and contained. So, for example, in Java, you can't go outside the bounds of an array. Ever. Period. Turning off array subscripting is not an option.'"

Comments

Java snake oil

[pauljlucas]

So, for example, in Java, you can't go outside the bounds of an array. Ever. Period.

Of course you can. The JVM then throws an exception. Unless you have a test case that specifically tests array bounds, you're never going to be sure that your application won't die at 2:36am when you get paged.

The snail-oil marketing around Java has always annoyed me. "Java has no pointers, so no more pointer errors!" What crap. Kindly explain NullPointerException then. Sure, you can't do some of the free-wheeling things you can do in C with pointers, but Java does have pointers (hidden by a coating syntactic sugar).

The Java snail-oil salesmen try to convince you that your code will be bug free because certain classes of errors just can't happen. Again, what crap. They can happen. The only thing the JVM does is tell you precisely when they happen. Is this better than insideous bugs in C that change memory they shouldn't but don't crash as a result until later? Certainly. But the bugs still happen in Java. And they can be insideous in different ways.