Interview With the Father of Java

Eh-Wire writes "The Globe & Mail interviews James Gosling after a keynote talk to Sun developers in his home town of Calgary. His thoughts and comments regarding the 'dead end' oil industry, disconnected Telco strategist, and unleashing 'creative weirdoes' makes for an interesting read." From the article: "Java is evolving. It's sort of embedded in the social experiment that is the Internet. There's been tremendous adoption of Java for building large-scale enterprise apps. It's worked tremendously well there. There's been all kinds of growth lately in cellphones and more and more embedded systems. It's all about making the environment around us more intelligent."

Comments

Not compatible with itself

[MECC]

Does this guy have any excuse why Java isn't compatible with itself? Why won't something written to run in 1.4.1 run in 1.4.2, or 1.5? All this ends up meaning is that no matter how interesting java the language is, when you get something written in java, it comes out of the box broken. Seriously, if I install two java products on my computer, each written in a different version of java, they break one another, unless I come up with a work-around.

For a language to be so incompatible with itself, no matter how you cut it, or what last-minute workaround you manage to cough up, that is so wrong there is no final verdict to pass on java other than "FAILURE".

I've had to tell people walking in the door with 30k$ products to get lost because it written in java. Why? Because it was found to break the 100k$ product written in another version on java. That makes it range anywhere from 100% dysfunctional to just a run of the mill nightmare to deal with. Other bendors trot out their java-powered web sites, and it ends up either not working because of another currently deployed java product or it breaks the currently deployed java product. Unfortunety for that vender, they get the distinction of being labeled 'unable to support services' - for no reason other than that they just had to do it in java.

As a matter of practice, anyone suggesting using java to implement something should just have their tounge cut out and stapled to their foreheads. Before they're fired.