Q&A With James Gosling, Father of Java

Minaloush writes to tell us that in a recent Q&A with Sun's James Gosling, the father of Java fielded questions on the GPL, security, the role of Java in the enterprise. "If you come up with a good software development tool, that makes life easier for the developers and they can get their job done quicker, then the first thing the manager says is 'oh you've got free time on your hands. Do this extra thing'."

Comments

Re:What about Patrick Naughton?

[Frosty Piss]

He kind of was written out of the story after this (Wikipedia):

In September 1999, a FBI sting operation netted Naughton on charges related to the alleged solicitation of inappropriate sexual conduct with a minor. Disney immediately fired him shortly after his arrest in Santa Monica.

He got caught in one of those chat room stings, trying to set up a little get-together with some way-underage female.

Re:Why yet...

[teknopurge]

Is this a joke or a troll? Declining? Java is 54% of the corporate market for enterprise applications.

The WORA 'paradigm' as you called it is alive and well. j2se6 is fast - even swing is fast.

I've been using java for 9 years, first on the client and then on the server. The frameworks like struts, spring and shale are bringing religion and consistency to Java applications - and management LOVES consistency. Outside of corporate America, j2me is in most cell phones and set-tops.

Jobs on dice.com

'java' - 16156
'c#' - 6634
'asp' - 3521
'asp.net' - 4581
'.net' - 9097 (inclusive of previous keyword)

Fatality. Rayden(Gossling) Wins.

Re:Isn't the old license quite a bit more restrict

[roscivs]

Isn't the old license quite a bit more restrictive than just passing a test suite? I mean, many Linux distros have either been requiring that the J2RE and so forth be downloaded from sun.java.com or they've been requiring that you download 3rd party implementations based on the Sun source like blackdown. It doesn't sound to me like the license was ever as laisez-faire as Gosling seems to be implying here.

The old license also had a clause that said you couldn't distribute the SDK with a competitor to Sun's implementation. This was probably intended (like the test suite restriction) to avoid any Microsoft-style "embrace and extend," but there was enough worry that distributing the SDK along with gcj was against the terms of the license that just about every Linux distro opted to distribute a non-Sun Java.

Re:Then the best ide is ....

[hey!]

Well, you must be pretty young, then. I've at least messed machines in the 4K range, worked professionally writing programs to fit in 16K, and I have several friends who are still working today who remember working with systems with 2K of RAM or less. Granted they're at about retirement age.

Of course you have to be careful because it wasn't until the late eighties that the industry completely standardized on the eight bit byte. Memory sizes in the late 70s and early 80s were usually specified in terms of "words", a word being the particular machine's most natural size operand for integer arithmetic. The PDP-8 came with 4KW of memory, where each word was 12 bits. Thus our 4KW of memory was in actuality a whopping 6KB of core memory. The PDP-10 had a 36 bit word; the very early versions that had "8K" memories actually had 36KB.

Bill Gates claims he never said that 640KB was all anybody would ever need. Back in 1981 he must certainly have been aware that some people needed more. You could buy a PDP-10 which could address 32 separate segments of 256KW. Since each word was 4.5 bytes, each segment amounted to 1024KB, giving a total of 36MB (36.864MB you use powers of ten instead of powers of two).