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

Re:Gosling, Java? Hmmm.....

[Cyberax]

Generics are non-existent to me. They won't be anywhere around until 2006-2007. And there will be something much better than Java in that timeframe, IMHO.

DotNET platform now has all chances to bes Java replacement on desktop (OpenSource Mono will help).

Java had the last chance to change, but miss

Trolling in the article?

[Schwarzchild]

EA I'm curious about a couple of other languages. My favorite language to hate is Perl. It seems like no real thought was given to the language. It kind of grew over the years. So it's just really deeply, deeply ugly.

This is a boneheaded remark. You could say the same thing about Sendmail. Perhaps he's just trolling?

JG Well, yes, but that's part of its charm. It's sort of the resurrection of TECO. Everything in it is about text, so if the data you care about is text, it's pretty nice. I actually like Perl. I can't say I'm real good at it, and I certainly wouldn't want to do any big projects in it. It's sort of a maintenance nightmare. It has very little in the way of structuring and abstraction and all the other things that one would need to do truly industrial-strength software. But as a language to do narrowly defined mind puzzles, it's pretty entertaining.

Wow, is Gosling really that clueless?