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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'."
We've already forgotten, we just haven't forgiven yet.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
"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'." ... and that is why I still program in assembler and I use notepad.
He got caught in one of those chat room stings, trying to set up a little get-together with some way-underage female.
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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.
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So what you're saying is that Java is a language of child predators...
I liked the additional comment:
// do nothing
> He later resolved the case in plea bargain with the U. S. Attorney's office in exchange for working for the FBI for a year to develop software to assist them in their online investigations.
I wonder if he is going to burry the check
if (suspect == "Patrick Naughton")
{
}
somebody else can make sure that is Java syntax.
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Hmm... Maybe I shouldn't run Java on my Reiser4 filesystem?
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Crafting tools is not wasting time. Frequently the fastest way to accomplish s six-week project is to take a month to write the tool...which will then complete the project in under a week. Management with your attitude will a) never see tools produced that increase the department's overall productivity and b) you won't have the best people working for you. No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here.
Declining popularity? I remember recent studies showing that Swing is the most used UI toolkit, I believe Java is the most used language for corporate and commercial web applications, and Java programmers are in higher demand than ever. What makes you think it's declining in popularity? Maybe it's lost its "cool" factor to Ruby and Python, but not popularity.
Here's a couple of links from this year to back me up:
http://www.jasonkolb.com/weblog/2007/02/programmi
http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
http://www.mhall119.com
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.
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'.net' - 9097 (inclusive of previous keyword)
Fatality. Rayden(Gossling) Wins.
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I've read TFA, it's always interesting to see was Gosling has to say on Java...
Java is such a huge success, my favorite quote from TFA:
"...you can't send a parcel through FedEx without a bunch of Java code being involved. It's almost impossible to execute a financial transaction without a piece of Java code being involved."
So true... And GMail, and eBay. Read the enlightening paper on how Java / Spring is used at Voca (in the UK) to process real-world money, scaling at insane levels.
That said, to me, the best Gosling quote I ever read was in an Artima interview. Basically, Gosling said that he regretted not having gone "pure interface" in Java. Java could have been a much cleaner language if Gosling had gone this way: remove the "abstract" keyword/construct from the language (and hence remove the "protected" keyword too, which makes no sense once the "abstract" keywork is gone). And prevent concrete inheritance. So Java would have been a more OO language, where only inheritance of interface would have been possible. Some people (a tiny minority) program in Java in this way. Most people do not get that concept: that OO is all about ADT (Abstract Data Types) and that a concrete implementation should be a detail. To most people this is heresy, because "you've got to type more characters, you've got to create 'needless' interfaces,..." (in modern IDEs most of these problems are non-existent for you can delegate/compose using a single shortcut). Remove the abstract keyword today from the language, and you can millions of Java developers screaming and whining endlessly. It is sooo sad Gosling didn't do it before releasing Java to the public. Every single program out there today in Java would be more OO-ish and more testable.
It is interesting to note that Bjarne Stroustrup, on that very subject, has explained a great many times that "people simply don't get it". Here's a quote on the same subject by Bjarne Stroustrup:
"Since then I have consistently pointed out that one of the major ways of writing classes in C++ is without any state, that is, just an interface."
This is OO 101. And yet hardly anyone can understand this. I'm into OOA(nalysis) / OOD(esign) and it is not always trivial to do OOP using a 3GL (third generation language, like C++ or Java) but with some thinking and discipline it's possible to get close to "real OOP" using Java. Sadly this is not what 99% of the Java programming world is doing.
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