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Father of Java, James Gosling Unloads
javab0y writes "The folks over at basementcoders did a podcast with James Gosling, The Father of Java, last week at a coffee shop in San Francisco during the JavaOne conference. In a raw and no-holds-barred interview, James let loose on Oracle, the Google Lawsuit, and his experience with IBM. You know its going to be good when he starts out saying, 'I eventually graduated in '83. Went to work for IBM which is, you know, is within the top 10 of my stupidest career decisions I've made.' The podcast was fully transcribed."
It was an hour long interview recorded on a handheld device, and we (basementcoders & TheServerSide) tried to get the transcription out as quickly as possible so those who didn't have the time to listen to the hour long interview could at the very least read through it. There's a few typos in there that we'll fix soon enough, but putting that aside, you really get to the heart of what's driving Gosling and what he hopes for the future of Java.
I have plenty of respect for the guy's technical prowess. He was definitely also in the right place at the right time but also undoubtedly technically brilliant. And yet he runs his career like a schoolboy. You just don't go around openly rubbishing former employers like that as it makes prospective employers wary. After all you'll probably rubbish them when you're done too. I wonder how many opportunities he's missed acting that way.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Back when I was in high school and java was new I was taking a comp sci class where we were given the names of important people in the IT industry and asked to write a report on who they were and why they're important. I googled his name on altavista.com (there was no google) and found nothing (no wikipedia at the time) except an email address at Sun. So I emailed him a list of everything I needed to know and promptly received a reply. Good luck reaching any IT big wig these days.
I actually did not know, until today, that Microsoft was paying a Java patent license fee for .NET's design.
Just before he said the above, he said this, which is probably obvious to many people, but I found it poignant all the same:
The Internet is full. Go away.
2. This isn't your typical dime a dozen BSCS or BSEE cubical wage slave that be easily replaced.
3. Unlike the folks in #2, he can say, "I created billions of dollars worth of revenue for x,y,z"
Of course he'll get hired - even by big unimaginative corporations who like their cookie-cutter employees.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
I skimmed the whole thing, and read a few good chunks of it, in about 5 minutes. Much better than listening to a full hour-plus of audio. Thanks to whoever did that!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Without James I would only have to maintain half the servers I do today and would likely be out of a job.
Got Code?
So far ahead?
.NET run on? [answer: 1 - Windows]. If you customer is big (bank, government department, military etc) they simply aren't running their biggest systems on Windows and .NET is not even a contender.
.NET]
.NET is good for the desktop, it blows in the enterprise (fortunately most enterprise developers know this; only folks with less than a decade of enterprise development experience seem to be under the delusion .NET is a better strategic choice [although it certainly has tactical advantages, but only n00bs get excited about them]).
How many platforms does
What approximate percentage of the development market (projects, jobsm tools, conferences, books, etc) does C# have relative to Java? [answer: approx 25% according to Tiobe.com; even PHP is a more popular development tool than C#]
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
What development platform has had no epidemics of vulnerabilities when deployed to be the Internet? [Answer: Java; contrast the ASP.Net platform that is was discovered to be *very* badly remotely exploitable in the last few days so much that Microsoft had to issue an emergency out-of-band patch]
Which development platform is conservative adding features (not worrying about 'trendy' features that get deprecated on the next release) so that massive investments on code are not deprecated by the need of a vendor to sell you a new IDE version every two years? [Answer: Java, not
You can keep your shiny new features that affect 2% of your codebase and survive for two years before something replaces them. I'll stick to saving myself time, my customers money, all the while keeping their systems safe.
Ok, since he's unloading, let me "unload" too.
Mr. Gosling, the only reason Java is any good at all is because large numbers of technically competent people (many of them at IBM) fixed up the bad design decisions you made and patched up your horrible implementation. Unfortunately, there are limits to how much one can fix if a language is as broken as Java 1.0 was.
You have some gall criticizing Dalvik, which runs efficiently, unbloated, and apparently quite securely on millions of phones. The sandbox on your Java design and implementation on the other hand was insecure and buggy both conceptually and in terms of implementation, as a never ending stream of published problems showed. Of course, since Java failed for applets, hardly anybody cares anymore; nowadays, Java's sandbox is just bloat for most users.
And all the while you were promoting Java as an "open" language, you knew that it was covered by Sun patents that made any independent implementation impossible, what a cynical and evil thing to do.
Fortunately, its awful UI libraries kept Java from achieving any significance on the desktop or web, and for most server side software, people have developed alternatives based on less bloated platforms that are easier to develop for.
And of course, it's Java that sucked up all the development resources at Sun without yielding much in terms of revenue; it's the reason Sun eventually went out of business. And mobile Java's poor performance, poor compatibility, and horrible user interface killed mobile applications development until Apple came out with iPhone. What is Java going to kill next?