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Gosling on Computing

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the teco-shoutouts dept.

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.'"

1 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Gosling, Java? Hmmm..... by Cyberax · · Score: 5, Informative

    I lost all my respect to Gosling after a clumsy attempt to add generics to Java.

    The right way to add generics to Java is a radical modification of JVM (Java Virtual Machine), but Sun didn't want to it. So they made an attempt to add generics to Java language without touching JVM. The result of this attempt is a complex scheme of name mangling (just like C++), and some unnecessary overhead. And such implementation _still_ requires some JVM changes and is incompatible with old JVMs. So now we have an ugly generics in Java and Java 5.0 (rebranded J2SE 1.5) incompatible with previous versions.