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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."
If anyone is interested in conversing with James Gosling one-on-one, he (amazingly) hangs out at DevShed.com in the forums, likes to aswer questions, and my guess is he knows what he's talking about when it comes to Java. Even more amazing is that as smart a guy as he is, his social skills leave a lot to be desired (read some of his posts in the Lounge).
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Why the hell did the interviewer decide to turn it into a "how did/does/will Java work with MS technologies" diatribe?
I mean, theyre so disparate in ideaology, while I can understand some of the relationships, why on earth bring them up with the creator of a language that MS has deliberately shunned when they couldnt get it to work "their way"?
Very puzzling. Poor journalism in my opinion.
...both interiorlly, and exteriorlly.
> (Sun CEO) McNealy: We absolutely underhyped [Java].
Uh, Scott; that's not the way the rest of us remember it.
Yep, it's been 10 years since Java was officially introduced. It should come as no surprise that I was being turned down for jobs 2 years ago because the jobs in question required 10 years of Java experience. (And 5 years of C#/.NET experience as well. And I think at least one required post-doctoral work in Physics, Astrology, and Film.)
1. Kudos to the Groovy authors. They've even garnered James Gosling's attention. If you write Java code and consider yourself even a little bit of a forward thinker, look up Groovy. It's a very important JSR (JSR-241 specifically).
2. He talks about Javascript solely from the point of view of the browser. Yes, I agree that Javascript is predominently implemented in a browser, but it's reach can be felt everywhere. Javascript == ActionScript (Flash scripting language). Javascript == CFScript (ColdFusion scripting language). Javascript object notation == Python object notation.
But what about Javascript and Rhino's inclusion in Java 6? I've been using Rhino as a server side language for a while now because Struts is way too verbose for my taste. I just want a thin glue layer between the web interface and my java components. I'm sick and tired of endless xml configuration (that means you, too, EJB!). A Rhino script on the server (with embedded Request, Response, Application, and Session objects) is the perfect glue that does not need xml configuration. (See also Groovy's Groovlets for a thin glue layer).
3. Javascript has been called Lisp in C's clothing. Javascript (via Rhino) will be included in Java 6. I also read that Java 6 will allow access to the parse trees created by the javac compiler (same link as Java 6 above).
Java is now Lisp? Paul Graham writes about 9 features that made Lisp unique when it debuted in the 50s. Access to the parse trees is one of the most advanced features of Lisp. He argues that when a language has all 9 features (and Java today is at about #5), you've not created a new language but a dialect of Lisp.
I am a Very Big Fan of dynamic languages that can flex like a pretzel to fit my problem domain. Is Java evolving to be that pretzel?
From TFA:
This is nit-picking, I know, but I was under the impression that scripting languages were actually defined by the presence of an actively-running interpreter during execution, making it possible to, e.g., construct and execute statements at runtime with things like PHP's exec() or Lua's do(file|string) functions (see: http://www.lua.org/pil/8.html for discussion on dofile and Lua's status as a scripting language). I wasn't aware that capability for rapid prototyping or language speed had anything to do with it.
Taking that into consideration, then, would Java with JIT qualify as an interpreted or compiled language? I'm not sure, myself---any thoughts?
That aside, a solid interview. Java looks to be pretty interesting; though in its current form it does bug the hell out of me (System.out.println()? Yeah, yeah, OO, but come on, three nested levels of scope just to get to a command line?), its progress has been impressive, and it's an innovative idea.
Unfortuately things can happen like a GC cycle at a bad time that can cause annoying slowdowns at the worst moment.
As Java is now used in real-time control applications, that is certainly avoidable.
bloated: the java class libraries are huge and so deploying a java environment (and you can't assume a decent java system will already be installed by default) is a huge undertaking
Not really. Java can be installed as a single rpm or tgz. Its over 10 mb, but given the size of a CD-ROM, or broadband download speeds, that is hardly a 'huge undertaking'.
and who would seriously wan't to release thier software as java bytecode when jad is arround?
There are plenty of bytecode obfuscators around.
It's been ten years since the official introduction of Java
And the damn thing still hasn't finished loading.
Yes, Java is slower to run than C++. However Java is faster to write than C++; and I think that's the real issue.
In terms of power of expressivity, I think they're about the same, but I find Java easier to read than C++, and I find that mid-level programmers make far fewer subtle "shoot yourself in the foot" mistakes in Java than they do in C++. The run-time array bounds checking, lack of pointers, checked exceptions, and the lovely NullPointerException serve to keep a lot of people out of trouble. The embarrassing wealth of pre-written, tested, free, source-available modules Java has, over the reinvent-the-wheel approach of C++ goes a long way in improved programmer productivity. Here's a test for you: have one of your middle-skilled programmers do some network communication in Java and C++ and see which program takes less time to write and works better.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
C++ was 14 around 1997 and was widely used and known for its high performance.
That's not how I remember it. I remember in 1996-1997 people were scoffing at C++ because it was "slower than C".
Eclipse claims to have about 45% of the Java IDE market, however that is about as accruate claiming that Firefox has 67 millions users. Eclipse uses the download count to get an estimate, I'd guess its closer to maybe 30%. I believe Netbeans is around 15%-25% and rising fast. Netbeans has won multiple awards in many areas for IDE design. Eclipse is really just a foundation and corporations pay big bucks to get in on it. Eclipse's drive isn't the community, the foundation members decide where eclipse is going. Eclipse is a good basic IDE but for anything extensive, you need to download a ton of plugins and/or buy proprietary ones.
With a default install of Netbeans, you get a full IDE with regular java programming capabilites and standard features (code completion, java doc, etc...), GUI application tools, it includes a great RAD for gui interfaces. You get WebServices programming capabilities with a fully integrated IDE and application server. With 2 other downloads on netbeans.org, you get a full J2ME development environment,including a gui tool to create interfaces for mobile phones, along with about 10 different phone emulators. You also get an enterprise level memory and performance profiler.
All in all, Netbeans is much better integrated and provides many more features. Eclipse hasn't really innovated for well over a year now, and many of its sub projects are hardly under development anymore. Netbeans used to have a bad reputation because it was a memory hog, slow, and for many years it was under stagnant development. In the past 2 years though, its made a complete 180 and is fast, full featured, and probably the best IDE in the market. Give it a shot if you haven't and use it for a bit. Its free, so its not like you're losing anything.
Regards,
Steve
There are other attacks, but most of the "exploits" are due to a buffer overflow (90% of all exploits? 95%?). Heck, if I'm am not mistaken it was a buffer overflow that put an end to the "x years without a hole in the default OpenBSD install" slogan :(
Now how many buffer overflow did happen in the JVM in the last 10 years?
I think the answer is zero. And if it's not zero, it's only some implementation of the JVM that was at fault.
For me it's all about the sandbox. Java, Jython, Groovy, you-name-it... I don't care. As long as it targets the JVM. It's tried, lean, mean, rock solid technology. You just ain't escaping it.
In TFA (yup, I did read it), Gosling says that "The only serious divide is they (C# / .Net) have this unsafe mode which they use a lot. One of the principles I believe in is there shouldn't be an unsafe mode."
That's a good principle to believe in.
Eclipse has 2,425,709 lines of Java code and runs on any J2SE 1.4 (or newer) compliant JRE from any vendor on many platforms (the essential parts of it will run even on PDAs). I don't think any scripting language would have been up to this task.
My opinion is that Java is the best thing that could have possibly happened in the software development field in the last 20 years. The fact that it is an openly specified object-oriented runtime suitable for a *huge* variety of configurations (desktop, middleware, embedded, etc) is a blessing. Developers have been able to learn one language and develop any kind of applications on any platforms (while reusing many of the skills). Also, vendors can target a much wider market when they do not have to focus on a single platform. Not mentioning that Linux owes a lot of its success to Java.
Everytime java is discussed on slashdot, I'm amazed at how some junior leaguers try to dismiss it because they can point out one application where java is a poor choice.
There are some applications where it does not make sense to implement in java. However, I say that java is a great choice for the top layer of a web application server stack. There are a lot of web apps that take the form of:
1. Gather data from one or more databases.
2. Perform some consolidation and express the output in html.
In this example, java is a consolidator of data from disparate data sources. It needs to hang on to several network connections and do some simple IO but it does not need to burn the CPU at 100% because it spends most of it's time blocked on IO. Java is a great choice for applications like this because there is a very large and active community working to make java dynamic web serving better and better. Every year your organization can, for free, upgrade to a new version of java and simple app server like Tomcat and reap the rewards of the communities improvements. Also, in my experience with server applications, the promise of portability is real. I've ported from windows to solaris and then to linux without changing the java application.
The "barfing runtime exceptions" was exactly my point. It's not only a red flag for badly written code, it's a built-in QC test. I'm TIRED of reading other people's code and having to go back to them and say "O.K., this (really arcane thing that you never will understand) might/probably will happen, and so therefore I can't put you code into production". All them "barfed runtime exceptions" make my argument for me. I can simply fiat "no unhandled exceptions" and leave it at that.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
As I was searching for some info about JBuilder, I stumbled across this juicy bit that I had not seen before.
a d_id=34246
Borland announces JBuilder Roadmap; future will be Eclipse-based
The jist of the story is that in the first half of 2006, JBuilder will ship a new version, code-named "Peloton", which will be completely Eclipse-based !!!
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thre
below is much of the article text in case it gets swamped.
Borland has announced their technical roadmap for JBuilder. Later this year Borland will ship JBuilder 2006 which will add shared code and shared debugging features. In the first half of 2006, JBuilder will ship a new version, code-named "Peloton", which will be completely Eclipse-based and add better dependency analysis features.
The shared code and debugging will allow developers in different locations to participate in shared coding and debugging, as though they were sitting down together in the same room.
The Eclipse news follows up from their February announcement of joining the Eclipse board and their intention to re-build their entire application life cycle management product suite on top of Eclipse. Borland sees Eclipse as an integration framework upon which they will be building JBuilder as well as their other products. By leveraging Eclipse, they can realize the cost savings of not having to worry about maintaining IDE functionality, and integration with other Borland tools, as well as gaining a larger audiece via Eclipse and benefitting from the large ecosystem of Eclipse tools.
According to Rob Cheng, director of developer solutions at Borland, the major new addition planned for Peloton will be a dependency analysis feature. It will be able to understand the dependencies between different artifacts in the project, such as the link between JSP's and struts controllers, EJB's and the persistence tier, without the user needing to configure these explicitly or switch views. Debugging will be improved - stepping into different tiers will be easier without end users needing to manually set additional breakpoints.
Code-name Peloton comes from a cycling metaphor, which is used to describe a group of cyclists who can ride faster together than they could individually, reflecting Borland's emphasis on team collabortation features in JBuilder.
Borland has not announced any pricing information, but they are looking into offering a separate 'distribution' of JBuilder on Eclipse all integrated to make it easy for corporate clients to deploy.
Borland chose Eclipse over Netbeans after watching industry momentum and listening to customers who think Eclipse will be their next major platform.
When asked about what their differentiators for JBuilder-Eclipse over Websphere Studio will be, Borland responded that WS Studio is focused on Websphere, whereas JBuilder supports multiple application server platforms.
Luis De La Rosa in his 2005 predictions suggested that Eclipse will become the Java community's answer to Visual Studio.NET, as a de facto IDE; this being a good thing for the Java community, as Eclipse will help build a market/ecosystem for development tools much like Visual Basic, which is the real goal that Sun wants to reach: 10 million developers using Java.
Borland's decision to join IBM in basing their IDE on Eclipse is certainly bringing us closer to that prediction! What do you think?
They entirely overhyped it in areas where it's relatively useless (the desktop) and entirely underhyped it in areas where it's extremely useful (backend and embedded areas).
Now ten years later you talk about "java" and all anyone remembers are those horrible, sluggish AWT applets, running on netscape 4.0's broken JVM, which they used during the initial Java hype push. But almost nobody these days knows about the success Java met in unglamorous areas after the hype push had died off.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
2. Out of the box EJB support that is good.
3. Out of the box webservices support.
4. A much better, more mature GUI Editor that's going to get even better in 4.2. (Not sure if VE is in eclipse 3.1)
5. Cool auto comment tool
6. Bundled Tomcat and Full J2EE compliant app server.
7. This guy's blog to read :)
8. This one is subjective but to me... i don't find the interface as cluttered or ugly as Eclipse. Obviously other's disagree. Also even the the windows are not native, the layout is much closer to what native dialogs look like on windows. With Eclipse, the dialog boxes just seem weird. Error messages look and feel like they don't belong, etc.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Unsafe mode was added to C# to allow the grandfathering of massive volumes of ill-behaved code into .NET systems. Microsoft does not like giving up old code bases.
And Sun, instead, creates millions of lines of untested, immature C code and adds it to their Sun Java implementation (just look at the Java2D code). Frankly, I trust even Microsoft's libraries more than that.
Microsoft's claim that sprinkling "unmanaged code" everywhere in your system is superior to linking to external libraries is very strange.
Unsafe statements are explicitly marked in C#, and they are limited to unsafe modules. C# is exactly the same as JNI in that regard, but C# provides you with a much better language to write JNI-like modules in, a language that is far safer than C/C++ even in unsafe mode, and a language that actually works across systems.
What does the phrase "tightly limit unsafe code to just the statements where it is needed, often just a single statement" mean? How can you limit something that can be everywhere?
It means that as a programmer developing a piece of code that needs to do something unsafe, it's better for me if I can compile almost all of my code in safe mode and only have a single line of unsafe code, than being forced to write an entire JNI module in C/C++.
Now they're claiming it's okay to put buffer overflow vulnerabilities in your code because it's convenient for the programmer. They just don't seem to understand security.
You keep confusing safety and security; safety is neither necessary nor sufficient for security. Most Java applications are, in fact, not secure at all.
C# supports runtime safety in a well-designed and time-tested framework, which is helpful for building secure systems. But forcing people to use only safe constructs does not improve security any further, it actually makes it worse.
I never really bought the "social skills" bunk. I think chitchat and small talk is useless and stupid so I usually don't engage in it. Does this mean I don't have "social skills"? As long as you are articulate, and unless you are in public relations, fuck "social skills".
Stereotypical pseudo-rational geek attitude.
The inconsequential "chitchat and small talk" are the manner in which we find out more about the person we're dealing with before things get more serious, allowing us to "feel our way round" when we are unsure. This may apply to both strangers and people we're currently unsure of; don't bring on the heavy stuff first. They're the manner in which we show respect by asking questions about the other person that may not *directly* involve the business we have with them; of course, this may open up opportunities we hadn't considered, possibly leading to friendship and/or greater business involvement.
Not everyone is equally good at this. Not everyone places equal importance on it. That's part of the healthy mix of personalities that push some people to work in public-facing jobs, and others to work in more "human-phobic" areas (such as the more technical aspects of computer hardware). It's okay to not be a "small talk" person, as you are.
On the other hand, to criticise it for being "useless" (because it doesn't serve any obvious purpose) smacks of blinkered short-sightedness and the kind of (phoney) rationalisation of their own behaviour that geeks like to indulge in.
Frankly, the kind of people who come out with this kind of stuff probably consider themselves "rational". Actually, that displays a laughable (and verging-on-the-autistic) lack of self-awareness. Geeks are no more "rational" than a lot of other people; they have their own neuroses and obsessions that are obvious when you take a step back. For example, to use the same surface "rationalisation", what purpose does being fanatical about "Star Trek", an entirely fictitious TV show serve? None. Surely it's more rational or logical (*) to live in the real world.
Of course, the fan will explain how it represents the problems of today's world in a semi-abstract manner, blah blah... the more insightful will mention that it provides an outlet for the geek personality type. Point is; if they are forced to explain it in depth, they'll put the effort into considering their own behaviour that they won't even waste considering anyone else's. (Although they won't explain it as an excuse to escape the real world or dress in fantasy costumes; that would be too close to the bone).
So, to get back to the point, your failure to even recognise the purpose of small talk (whether you like it or not) smacks of the most arrogant and deluded abuse of rationality to justify your own shortcomings and behaviour.
(*) Reminds me of a friend I had in my early teens who was into sci-fi, had a crap geeky sense-of-humour and an obsession with Spock and "logic". He was no more logical than anyone else; in fact, sometimes he was downright weird. In retrospect, I reckon he was (slightly) autistic in some form.
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