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James Gosling on Java
prostoalex writes "It's been ten years since the official introduction of Java - a programming language combined with virtual machine and a class library. ZDNet published an interview with James Gosling, the creator of Java, who talks about the project's past, present and future."
I think the biggest selling point of Java was the cross-platform compatibility. However, 10 years later, I think that it is clear that this promise was largely a fraud. Java was a perhaps a good new platform for writing enterprise applications and applications for certain consumer niches for those developers who didn't want to deal with the unsafe languages like C or C++ or those who were fooled by Sun into believing that Java is the best thing since whatever, but cross-platform compatibility for large applications still remains problematic. For example, most vendors of fairly complex java applications I have seen, not only require you to use a certain version of OS and a web browser (if that's an applet) but also they demand a certain version of the java virtual machine is used and with certain patches on some operating systems. And if you don't meet their requirements, you often run into problems. I bet a python or a perl script would have fared much better in many of those settings as far as portability is concerned.