James Gosling Leaves Google

scottbomb writes "Well, that didn't take long: 'After only a few months at Google, Java founder James Gosling has left the search engine giant to go to a small startup company specializing in ocean-based robotics.' In a brief blog post about his new company, Gosling says, 'They have a growing fleet of autonomous vehicles that roves the ocean collecting data from a variety of onboard sensors and uploading it to the cloud. The robots have a pile of satellite uplink/GSM/WiMax communication gear and redundant GPS units. They have a bunch of deployments. For example, one is a set of robots patrolling the ocean around the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico monitoring water chemistry. These craft harvest energy from the waves for propulsion and can stay at sea for a very long time. The longest that one craft has been out is 2.5(ish) years. They can cross oceans.... Slowly. They only move at 1-2 knots, which is a great speed for data collection.'"

Comments

Departing Letter to Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Google,

I believed you were different, but I was wrong.

Sincerely,
James Gosling

Boy, he really knows how to pick 'em.

Re:Departing Letter to Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's nice and all, but check out my doubles.

Re:Departing Letter to Google

[WindBourne]

And yet, I do not gather that is what he is saying. He is saying that he wants something different. He wants to make a difference. If smart(and he is), he will try to apply this back to Google and work with them.

Anti-Skynet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I can't say a fleet of autonomous robots roaming the world running Java would be a good thing...

But the Skynet scenario will be pretty much impossible at this point.

Re:Anti-Skynet?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I've got some bad news for you about certain improvements made to the speed and efficiency of the garbage collection algorithm...

Re:Anti-Skynet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't matter how much garbage you collect if everyone keeps forgetting to change the startup flags from the default of -XxxmMmfmmFMmmB 28.992 so you can use more than a few dozen megs

Re:Anti-Skynet?

[517714]

Not anti-SkyNet

If we're going to follow this guy around 24x7

[Anonymous Coward]

... shouldn't we be using twitter instead of /.?

SkyNet

[Niomosy]

At least we can take comfort in the robots likely getting a java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space error.

Re:SkyNet

[GodfatherofSoul]

I doubt Gosling has problems managing memory in Java.

Re:SkyNet

[_xeno_]

I doubt Gosling has problems managing memory in Java.

I dunno, you've never run into the more infamous "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space"?

This is the error that's generated when the Java VM itself (well, the classloader, I guess) runs out of memory.

Because, unlike Java code itself, the Java classloader never frees memory it uses, which means that if you use a class briefly on startup, that code itself will be kept in memory indefinitely and never freed.

Which wouldn't matter as much, if there weren't this special "PermGen" space that used to default to 1MB. (It's slowly been increased as the versions go on and the size of Java programs continued to bloat, I think the default is now something like 16MB and can, as of five years ago, be user-set via a command line parameter.)

So what does this have to do with SkyNet? Well, if it's written in Java, it will run out of PermGen space well before its self-modifying code can accomplish anything.

And, given that PermGen space is never freed, apparently James Gosling does have problems managing memory in Java.

Re:SkyNet

[Ossifer]

I'm still wondering why I can't -Xmx"as much as you bloody well need"...

Re:SkyNet

[binarylarry]

PermGen is gone in newer versions of Java.

Re:SkyNet

[0123456]

I'm still wondering why I can't -Xmx"as much as you bloody well need"...

It's the joy of garbage collection. If you did that then your system would run out of RAM whenever you ran two Java programs at the same time.

Re:SkyNet

[GodfatherofSoul]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but while the JVM doesn't free memory, it does recycle memory from it's allocated space. So, just because you might have accumulated the max memory your JVM might allocate, that doesn't mean your app isn't releasing memory back to the JVM. Kind of like super fetch except allocation is passive.

Re:SkyNet

[dshk]

I wonder how this post could be moderated informative. It is simply not true. If you have thought about that it is possible to reload Java web applications, then you would see yourself that the permanent generation is garbage collected as well. However, everybody experiences that it is hard to do well in practice, often the culprit is a third-party library. But I agree with grandparent, if somebody, James Gosling can do it right.

Re:SkyNet

[_xeno_]

If you have thought about that it is possible to reload Java web applications, then you would see yourself that the permanent generation is garbage collected as well.

Uh, that right there is the number one way to generate a "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space" error - reloading web applications. The number one cause of that error is when trying to run a Java web server that runs out of PermGen space because the classes loaded into it are never freed.

And I can guarantee that this bug isn't solved in the latest version of Java 1.6, because it still happens to me fairly frequently while writing Java web applications. As far as I know, the only solution is to increase the size of the PermGen space.

This is not a new problem and I still encounter it almost daily, so if you have a solution that magically fixes Java so that reloading web applications doesn't eat up all the PermGen space, I'd love to know about it!

Re:SkyNet

[Dwonis]

What newer version? It's still there in Java 6.

Re:SkyNet

[dshk]

I do not know a solution. But I know that Apache Tomcat developers made an effort to eliminate all class loading leaks from Tomcat itself, moreover in the last versions there is a mechanism in Tomcat which tries to detect and log possible class leak issues. It indeed show a few problems in my code.

Re:SkyNet

[pavon]

Larry is right. I have had to deal with this at work. Our applications create machine generated code, which is compiled and then loaded. I don't know about Java 1.7, but in 1.6 the default garbage collector does unload these classes when there are no more instances of them. The concurrent garbage collector doesn't by default but you can pass the "-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled" flag to the JVM to enable it.

Re:SkyNet

[Anonymous Coward]

given that PermGen space is never freed

Not true. PermGen space is freed when a classloader is garbage collected.

Re:SkyNet

[greg_barton]

Hate to break this to you, but SkyNet will run on multiple VMs.

Nice try, though.

Re:SkyNet

[goofy183]

Never frees ... unless you are using the CMS collector (any app that does that much class loading/creation/unloading is likely a great candidate for CMS) and you turn on CMSClassUnloadingEnabled in which case the JVM unloads Class objects which are NOT in use just fine.

Re:SkyNet

[goofy183]

As the other reply alluded this isn't a JVM problem but a problem with poorly written libraries. If a library sticks something in a ThreadLocal, creates a Thread, registers a JDBC driver, or several other tasks using classes from the webapp class loader and then DOESN'T CLEAN THEM UP when the webapp context is destroyed you get a ClassLoader leak. Just like any other Java memory leak it stems from having classes in the loader still reachable from the GC root.

Tomcat has made some great changes to their webapp classloader to watch for this bad behavior and forcibly remove/cleanup these references when a webapp shuts down, solving this problem in many cases.

Re:SkyNet

[TheRaven64]

Correct me if I'm wrong

Okay. The JVM uses a generational GC. This actually uses a few generations, but I'll talk about a simpler version than Java uses, because it's easier to understand:

When you allocate objects, it uses a simple bump-the-pointer allocator in the short-lived generation. If an object stays around for a while, it is moved into a longer-lived generation. If not, it is deleted. I'm skipping over most of the details here, because they're not relevant. The important thing is that the generations are scanned approximately independently, and each maintains a remembered set of all of the objects in another generation that it references.

Some things, however, are not dynamically allocated. If you write Hello World in Java, you will have a string object that you wrote as "Hello world" in your source code. This object never needs to be deallocated. Neither does the class with your static main() method. The string is simple - it doesn't have any pointers - but the class is more complicated. It may have static fields (class variables, for Smalltalk programmers) that reference other objects. The GC must be able to follow these pointers, or it will prematurely deallocate objects. The class is therefore allocated in memory that is scanned by the GC, but not managed by the GC. This is the permanent object generation: the PermGen that the grandparent was talking about. This is fine for most programs, which generate classes by compiling Java code and have a smallish fixed number of them. It's a problem for self-modifying programs that generate new classes on the fly (something that Java has had APIs for since the start).

Re:SkyNet

[DrXym]

PermGen space gets exhausted typically when you load a lot of classes in. Upon first reference the class info and all the final static vars get instantiated and are stuck into the permanant generation bucket of the GC which means they're not garbage collected until the app terminates. Load too many classes and the space is exhausted and bang goes the JVM. IMO the default behaviour of the JVM at least on desktops should be to roll with the application's needs and allocate more memory if more memory is needed.

As for Skynet, it would probably utilise the new invoke dynamic in Java 7 to sidestep the issue. As a consequence it's human processing facilities would be running on Jython, Groovy or JRuby.

Re:SkyNet

[Migala77]

I wonder how this post could be moderated informative. It is simply not true.

Hi, welcome to Slashdot!

Re:SkyNet

[gutnor]

poorly written libraries

I have had my share of PermGen issue. I wouldn't put the blame fully on the developer here.
It is extremely easy to create PermGen issue (immortal classes object) but the JVM provide very little (closer to nothing) to address that issue: no guideline, no debugging tool, no warning or easy way to detect a leak, .... This is a java self-inflicted problem, you shouldn't need advanced knowledge of the classloader inner-working (actually, the fact that you need to know about classloader at all to create a webapp is a bit silly to start with) or garbage collection implementation to write some basic CRUD webapp.

Re:SkyNet

[higuita]

switch out windows to linux ... or at least switch to a 64bit system...

in windows 32bits you can only use max about 1.5GB (or something like that) because the "OS" takes 50% of the RAM for him and being 32bits and windows, you can only use 3GB of ram

later windows can use more ram and pass a flag in the boot.ini for the OS "just" take 1GB of ram, and IIRC, that push the limit to about1.75GB or something, that is about the same limit as the (normal) linux 32bit (IIRC)

64bits OS will enable java to use the full memory size (unless there is another limit i dont know about) :)

Re:SkyNet

[TheSunborn]

You are both wrong and right. All objects allocated by Java can be garbadge collected. Including permgen. (See: http://blogs.oracle.com/jonthecollector/entry/presenting_the_permanent_generation)

However this does often not happen because some objects keeps a (Normally static) reference to this class. An example where this often causes problems are with loggers because they often keep an static reference to a class, because they use it when generating debug output.

Removing all references to a class when doing dynamic class loading is not as easy as it sound, and I know that tomcat had huge problems with this in tomcat 5.5 and 6. I had to restart my 6.0 tomcat server used for development due to this problem because I had it configured to auto reload all newly generated classes. But it seems that they fixed that problem with tomcat 7, because I have not seen a PermGen exception since I upgraded.

Re:SkyNet

[GravityStar]

IIRC, when in running with the -server switch, java is willing to -eventually- remove some of the unused memory in permgen.

Re:SkyNet

[Anonymous Coward]

>Because, unlike Java code itself, the Java classloader never frees memory it uses, which means that if you use a class briefly on startup, that code itself will be kept in memory indefinitely and never freed.

This is actually a JVM implementation issue, which plagues earlier Sun's JVMs. It's has nothing to do with Java the programming language.

Re:SkyNet

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Open Source so if you want it, you can write a patch so that everyone benefits.

Re:SkyNet

[Anonymous Coward]

PermGen is not related to the JVM. PermGen is specific to *SOME* Sun JVM implementations. Other JVMs never had PermGen issues and if I'm not mistaken this very lame feature is gone in newer Oracle/SUN JVMs.

Re:SkyNet

[BotnetZombie]

I somehow find it hard to believe that Skynet will run in a single process, especially given its spread out geographical locations. I bet it will be written in Erlang though.

Re:SkyNet

[recharged95]

I rather have that than a segfault, which can have worse results.

Re:SkyNet

[Ossifer]

I am using 64-bit, but there are still problems...

You still have to set, at start time, the maximum memory you'll be allowed to use, and then that can't be changed. If there's not enough VM for that, you crash immediately, otherwise you have a lock on what you might not need. Also, is more VM is available, but you didn't set Xmx high enough, you're out of luck...

Quite simply, the only tunable parameters in memory usage are hard constraints, and even they are not reliable...

Re:SkyNet

[Anonymous Coward]

Memory management in Java is not all sunshine and roses. Not only does every single object require an extra eight bytes of storage, just so it can be Java-groovy, but it is not hard for a single reference to an object, likely some sort of callback from the JRE, to keep your entire object graph in memory. Good luck debugging that, 20,000 leagues under the sea.

Re:SkyNet

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't use monospace font for ordinary text. It's fucking annoying.

Oracle?

[shutdown -p now]

Makes you wonder if the whole Oracle patent shitstorm around Java is making Google reconsider its reliance on that technology. If so, would be interesting to see what they bring forth instead.

Re:Oracle?

[JianTian13]

http://golang.org/ ?

Re:Oracle?

[shutdown -p now]

Go is an interesting language, but there hasn't been much effort from Google to provide adequate tooling for it so far (IDE, debugging etc). Also, its lack of generics in this day and age is quite surprising - even Java had those.

Re:Oracle?

[KiloByte]

Add more and more junk like generics and you'll end with languages as byzantine as C++ or Java.

KISS.

Re:Oracle?

[shutdown -p now]

Add more and more junk like generics and you'll end with languages as byzantine as C++ or Java.

Java is a "byzantine language", really? You must be a C coder if you seriously think so.

KISS.

Keep it Simple and Slow? ~

Re:Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go is interesting, but there are a couple things that turn me off. One is the optional semi-colon and required indent rules. And the Go-routines are interesting, but they should have studied up on erlang message passing.

Re:Oracle?

[khr]

... If so, would be interesting to see what they bring forth instead.

Dunno, maybe they'll switch to Forth as their language... That'd be pretty cool...

Re:Oracle?

[Eponymous Coward]

If I were an expert kremlinologist, I would think that you are suggesting Google will dump Java for Forth.

Re:Oracle?

[KiloByte]

Java is a "byzantine language", really? You must be a C coder if you seriously think so.

I'd say Linus Torvalds described this well enough.

KISS.

Keep it Simple and Slow? ~

Well, we're talking about Java vs C...

Seriously, there's a bad trend among some "modern" languages of piling up constructs without regards for efficiency, simplicity or sanity. For example, you can write a non-optimized compiler for languages I'd call sane in a week while for some a team in five years can't be expected to fully implement the standard. There is not a single compliant compiler of C++, and for Java it's only because of a skewed definition of "compliant" Sun has. And if you can't write a compiler reliably, how can you program in it?

The language with best balance between simplicity and featuritis I know is LPC. It has things sorely missing in C, like strings (something that C++ scrrewed in epic ways...), refcounted structures (arrays, mappings), closures, rudimentary OOP.

I did not get to learn golang yet, but it looks promising. I do have a bit of beef with some details, but nothing that'd make me vomit.

Re:Oracle?

[lennier]

Dunno, maybe they'll switch to Forth as their language... That'd be pretty cool...

FORTH GO MULTIPLY AND

Re:Oracle?

[shutdown -p now]

Seriously, there's a bad trend among some "modern" languages of piling up constructs without regards for efficiency, simplicity or sanity.

You have a point with respect to C++, though I think that's precisely what makes it invaluable for certain tasks - sometimes you do have a team that knows what they're doing, and they can do it so much better with that pile of features.

But what about generics that makes you lump them into the same category? Efficiency? - but C++ std::sort will beat qsort any day precisely because all polymorphism there is compile-time, and can be fully optimized. Simplicity? Granted, C++ templates are very complicated, but e.g. C# has a much simpler model for generics (it's also correspondingly feature-limited, but it covers most common cases like generic collections and algorithms well) which could be easily ported on top of C. Sanity? I'd argue that it's insane to have a statically, strongly typed language where all that strong typing goes out of the window, and you start scattering casts all over the code, the moment you start dealing with rich collections rather than atomic values or arrays.

Actually, my long-standing wish was to have well-designed generics added to C in a clean way. I'd take something like OCaml functors as a model for that - they're fully type safe, and also have to be explicitly instantiated before use; they cover all practical use cases; and they can be optimized as well as the corresponding manually written (separately for each instantiation) strongly typed code.

Another thing I'd kill for in C is a limited form of RAII, namely scope guards - the ability to say at any given point, "when the scope ends, run this before leaving it". So that you could do something like "FILE* f = fopen(); cleanup { fclose(f); }", and know that the handle is properly closed on all code paths, regardless of "return" or "goto" or whatnot.

Re:Oracle?

[JamesP]

IMHO slightly better than

(AND (MULTIPLY (GO (LISP))))

blah blah slashdot filter mary had a little lamb

Re:Oracle?

[dudpixel]

Are you surprised?

Google is pretty poor at supporting anything longer than a week past the initial launch date.

The whole Google business model appears to go like this:
1. Invent cool tech
2. Make it into an awesome product. Functional, and working, but not finished.
3. Dump it on the public (as a "beta") with a half-hearted launch effort.
4. Start on next project.

For GMail - it worked, partially because a functional product is really all most of us want.

Search is one of the few projects they continually work on - because its what makes them money.

For many of their projects, including Google+, they fail because Google fails at marketing and seeing a project through. Have a look at how Apple launch a product, compared to Google. Apple are often still telling us how wonderful they are even years later, while Google seems to forget about its own achievements after a week.

I like Google - I use many of their services, and have and Android phone + tablet and develop Android apps...but its just plain disappointing to see how little effort is put into their products post-launch. I'm specifically talking about marketing effort, as I'm sure they are working hard behind the scenes.

Re:Oracle?

[Digi-John]

I have helped write non-trivial programs in Go. It's quite pleasant. I think the big reason Google hasn't bothered to provide "adequate tooling" is the developers. That is, I think many of the creators and big users prefer to just work with a plain text editor rather than an IDE. There's a reasonably decent Emacs mode for Go, but it's readable enough without any syntax highlighting, and gofmt will fix your indentation and such for you. As for the debugger, well, there's http://blog.golang.org/2010/11/debugging-go-code-status-report.html (very old but even then they already had GDB support going), but as the first line says, "When it comes to debugging, nothing beats a few strategic print statements to inspect variables or a well-placed panic to obtain a stack trace", which is all I ever used to debug my Go code--and found it reasonably painless! Oh, and regarding generics--I'm not sure they'll ever go in. It is proposed CONSTANTLY on the mailing list, and Pike et al always indicate that they're not interested.

Re:Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

I got it!

Re:Oracle?

[bonch]

Add more and more junk like generics and you'll end with languages as byzantine as C++ or Java.

Yeah, nobody uses those!

Re:Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Another thing I'd kill for...

Don't killz, here you go:

struct FilePtr {
    FILE* fd;
    FilePtr() { fd = 0; }
    ~FilePtr() { if( fd ) fclose(fd); fd=0; }
} ...
void foo()
{
    FilePtr fptr;
    fptr.fd = fopen("file.txt", "r");
    if( fptr.fd ) {
        write to fptr.fd...
    } // On exit from function, FilePtr goes out of scope and closes the file. // Happens no matter where exit is - error exit, etc.- it's when FilePtr goes out of scope.
}

This is C++, not C, but you can always choose to use a "better C" subset of C++ features that suits you, many people do. I've used this trick for locking/unlocking mutexes (_very_ handy for that) and freeing memory too.

Re:Oracle?

[bertok]

Seriously, there's a bad trend among some "modern" languages of piling up constructs without regards for efficiency, simplicity or sanity.

It's not so much the languages, but the standard libraries. I've spent a lot of time writing performance optimised code (3D engines, large database-type apps, etc...), and the thing that shits me is this:

  foreach( x in list_of_x ) { foo( x ); }

where 'foo' does something like:

  prep();
  work_on( x );
  cleanup();

That is bad, especially if 'work_on(x)' has a couple of layers of the same kind of thing -- then there's virtually no hope of the compiler ever optimising that loop in any significant way, and there's nothing the programmer can do either. Magic tricks like static call analysis can sometimes help, but usually not.

When that kind of pattern is baked into a wide range of interfaces, there's just no avoiding it, and performance goes right out the window.

What would work a lot better if more APIs supported batch operations, e.g.:

    foo( list_of_x )

or more elegantly:

    foo( iterator_over_x )

That way, the 'prep()' and 'cleanup()' only happens once. If the list is big enough, the language overhead becomes irrelevant. Even if 'foo' is some expensive virtual function call, the cost is spread out over many items.

Unfortunately, efficient batch-style programming APIs are few and far between. While most of the old-school low level APIs use buffers (think file IO), the majority of business-oriented libraries and APIs are very inefficient. This is one of the reasons that complex business apps can take minutes to perform trivial processing over megabytes of data, but the same computer can pump gigabytes through a 3D game engine every second.

By far the worst offenders are n-tier applications, where some of those overheads can be network traffic. If an RPC function is called inside a loop, it's game over. This is why any time someone comes up with a marvellous framework that "unifies local and remote computing", or makes "RPC calls and local calls work the same", I just laugh and laugh....

Re:Oracle?

[drolli]

Could also be that there was some funny IP thing going on in the back. Maybe he just helped google write some patents based on his personal notes.

Re:Oracle?

[mwvdlee]

The first S stands for "Simple" as in "BASIC"? (whoops, accidentally held down the shift key there).

Re:Oracle?

[TheRaven64]

Another thing I'd kill for in C is a limited form of RAII, namely scope guards - the ability to say at any given point, "when the scope ends, run this before leaving it"

If you are willing to limit yourself to GCC-compatible compilers (GCC, clang, ICC, Path64, and - I think - XLC), then you should look up __attribute__((cleanup)). I use this for locks in C all the time. I just have a LOCK_FOR_SCOPE() macro, and the lock is automatically released when it goes out of scope. It's even exception safe if you compile with -fexceptions, so if some C++ or Objective-C throws an exception through your stack frame, it works nicely.

Re:Oracle?

[TheRaven64]

One is the optional semi-colon and required indent rules

Go doesn't have required indent rules, it has required brace positioning. I don't like this - it seems like a feature that's added for compiler writers, not for programmers, but it's not so bad.

And the Go-routines are interesting, but they should have studied up on erlang message passing

Erlang was inspired by CSP - it even uses CSP symbols for its message passing - but Erlang's actor model is harder to reason about in the common case than CSP, and it's easier to implement the actor model on top of CSP than implement CSP on top of actor model parallelism. Go provides a very nice CSP implementation. You can even implement Erlang's actor model on it quite trivially by giving the spawned goroutine the receive end of an interface{} channel and giving the send end (equivalent to the PID in Erlang) to other goroutines. Doing the opposite (implementing CSP in Erlang) requires you to spawn a forwarding process that maintains a map of possible receivers and handles forwarding messages to them, using some ugly hacks.

Re:Oracle?

[loufoque]

There are fully conforming C++ compilers.

Re:Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Add more and more junk like generics and you'll end with languages as byzantine as C++ or Java.

Or you'll end up with a well-engineered, carefully considered language like Ada.

Generics aren't "junk". Generics allow you to write generic code in an efficient and type-safe way, without having (error-prone and slow) type conversions everywhere.

Re:Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

This so much, it hurts.

Google, for an advertising company, DO VERY LITTLE ADVERTISING OF THEIR OWN SERVICES.

It is the reason Orkut is still seriously unknown, a whole social network, only really used by a few countries at the most with a random set of users from other places.
They could have combined Buzz, G+ and Orkut in to an ultimate social networking strategy, but they never even done that!
Buzz as twitter killer (not really, but just saying), G+ as the friend-related interaction tool(+Buzz), then Orkut as the full-on site with pictures, extended profile and so on. (+Buzz & G+)
It would have required a rewrite of the interface for all of them to at least keep some sort of similarity, but it would have been entirely doable.

Likewise with Google Wave. That was very useful. But they ended it because they never saw "the numbers they would have hoped". (AKA, profit)
And something that still confuses me: Google Labs? Why the hell would they kill that? Are they getting rid of employees 20% spare time thing or whatever? Or is it being brought down considerably?
If they had advertised these things instead of letting them sit there where only smart folks would bother to look (or the odd chance it ended up on [insert news site(s)]), maybe they'd have gotten enough users to consider making them fully fledged products.
So many of those things were useful to people. Especially when it came to advanced search tools.

I think the only thing I have seen advertised from them with actual effort, recently, has been Chrome.

Google really need to advertise MORE.

Re:Oracle?

[Wootery]

This is C++, not C, but you can always choose to use a "better C" subset of C++ features that suits you, many people do. I've used this trick for locking/unlocking mutexes (_very_ handy for that) and freeing memory too.

Except that you still pay the full price for using C++:

• You now require a C++ compiler, not just a C compiler.
• You cannot use C static-analysis tools.
• You have to worry about 'extern "c"' if you want to work with C code.

Not saying it's necessarily a terrible idea, but you pay a price for using C++ as a better C.

Re:Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty interesting how I read that as "Go forth and multiply" before I even noticed you wrote FORTH GO MULTIPLY AND

Word association man, it's crazy.

Re:Oracle?

[DetriusXii]

They're also useful in creating Functors in statically typed code. Foldleft and map from the functional languages can be mimicked by using generics. I think the programmer complaining about generics should have his opinion discarded. It's quite clearly wrong.

Re:Oracle?

[VGPowerlord]

IDEs add a lot as soon as you start working with a large number of libraries. This applies to any language, from C on up.

IDEs also help catch simple mistakes before compilation.

Oh, and those aren't even touching upon more advanced IDE features, such as refactoring.

Re:Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

And those are?

Last time I checked (two weeks ago), nothing was fully conformant with the latest standard.

Re:Oracle?

[oreaq]

Fully C++0x compliant? Can you name one or two?

Re:Oracle?

[Sloppy]

OMG what a fateful day that was, back in the mid-80s when I decided I needed to become proficient in a new-to-me higher-than-assembly language, and for some arbitrary reason decided I only had time at that moment to learn one [Kids! *facepalm*]. It came down to FORTH or C, and all I cared about, was the speed of the code generated by the compilers / speed of interpreters that were available to me at the time. [Kids! *facepalm*] Based solely on that one thing, I went with C.

Thank Fucking Yog-Sothoth. Sometimes an idiot makes the right choice for the wrong reasons.

I wonder how my life had gone, if I had not learned C. Would I have learned FORTH, found little use for it, and then just learned C a few months later? Maybe; I'll never know.

Re:Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Java is a "byzantine language", really? You must be a C coder if you seriously think so.

You say that like it's supposed to be an insult or something.

Re:Oracle?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

Or even just a .dex converter so that that Android applications can be written in Go instead of Java...

(Since hypothetically any language ought to be convertible to dalvik bytecode and not just Java, I'm surprised Google hasn't put any apparent effort into making that happen so that people don't NEED to program Android applications in Java if they don't want to for some reason.)

(If they came up with a converter that worked from Python code, I don't see how Android application availability wouldn't just plain explode...)

Re:Oracle?

[shutdown -p now]

Since hypothetically any language ought to be convertible to dalvik bytecode and not just Java

Not really, just like not any language can be converted to JVM bytecode. With Go, for example, you can have a pointer to an element in an array, and it is indistinguishable from a pointer to any other variable. There's nothing analogous in JVM bytecode - nor, so far as I know, in Dalvik. You can simulate it, but performance would be quite horrendous.

Re:Oracle?

[shutdown -p now]

I know how to do this with C++. The original discussion was explicitly about C, however. Note however that your code is extremely verbose - you have to write a wrapper type with destructor. Scope guards are something much simpler in intent.

Re:Oracle?

[shutdown -p now]

Being a "C only" coder? Well, yes, that would be borderline insult, at least on Slashdot. Same as being "X only" coder for any language X.

Re:Oracle?

[shutdown -p now]

Yes, I know about __attribute((cleanup)). I think it has some design deficiency - notably, it always applies to a single variable, it requires having a cleanup function (no inline code), and it has strict requirements for the signature of that function. For example, you cannot use it directly with fclose() when you need to clean up a FILE*, because it expects the cleanup function to accept FILE** (i.e. it always adds an extra level of indirection, even where it is undesired). Similarly, you can't use it directly with POSIX close(), Win32 CloseHandle(), or even something as basic as free().

It would be much more convenient if it just let you write a free-form statement that executes when the scope guard goes "out of scope" (i.e. its enclosing block is left). That way you can directly use standard cleanup functions, and you can also defer creating a guard until the point where you actually initialize the variable (and thereby avoid the need to init-to-null and do an extra check during cleanup).

And yes, I generally do have a preference for ISO-conforming C and C++ :)

Re:Oracle?

[loufoque]

C++0x is not a published standard yet.
C++, in that context, refers to C++03.

Re:Oracle?

[HiThere]

Generics are quite useful. C++ style generics are much less so, as they rapidly become too complex to sensibly debug. There are, however, other approaches taken by other languages. Both Ada and Eiffel had(have?) generics that were(are?) superior to those of C++. Even Common Lisp appears to have done better, though I've not used it enough to be certain.

Really, the C++ generics are a miserable botch of an excellent idea. Don't blame the idea for the particular implementation. That's as bad as blaming overloading of functions because some people misuse them. Stupid. It's quite possible to create incomprehensible sentences in English that are quite legitimate and yet totally impenetrable, if you know what I mean, when there's really nothing in English itself that is there for the express purpose of rendering the sentence unintelligible. (Well, OK, that sentence wasn't a good example. But it CAN be done, and this doesn't make English a bad language. [Now the word "is", that's another matter.])

Re:Oracle?

[gl4ss]

add notations to java and you can't know shit anymore what happens.
@magicword

and state of the art c++ was already unreadable 10 years ago, because all the new stuff just adds new syntax for doing something in a few lines(or messing with memory).

Re:Oracle?

[shutdown -p now]

add notations to java and you can't know shit anymore what happens.
@magicword

Huh? You seem to be confusing Java annotations with Python decorators. Java annotations are pure metadata - they are used to provide additional information associated with types and their members to libraries at runtime, but they don't modify any core language behavior (except for compiler warnings).

Re:Oracle?

[oreaq]

Fair enough. Which compilers are fully C++03 compliant?

Re:Oracle?

[loufoque]

Comeau, for example.

Re:Oracle?

[oreaq]

Thanks, didn't know that.

Re:Oracle?

[jgrahn]

Seriously, there's a bad trend among some "modern" languages of piling up constructs without regards for efficiency, simplicity or sanity. For example, you can write a non-optimized compiler for languages I'd call sane in a week while for some a team in five years can't be expected to fully implement the standard. There is not a single compliant compiler of C++ [...]

That argument worked in 1999, but not today. Both GCC and Microsoft have had reliable, compliant C++ compilers for many years now. And frankly I don't care if it takes *twenty* years to write a new C++ compiler, when gcc exists, is free, and is the first piece of software ported to any new CPU architecture.

I take out Gosling's trash

[TheModelEskimo]

It would be cool if they had a job opening for like, a janitor. I'll bet there would be some incredibly bright programmers applying for that janitor position. :-)

(Only annoyance: Manual garbage collection)

P.S. your logo is straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon

Re:I take out Gosling's trash

[supaneko]

His logo looks stoned................man.

Re:I take out Gosling's trash

[Anonymous Coward]

Logo?

Who's logo? Can you link to a jpeg or png of it or something?

Re:I take out Gosling's trash

[Anonymous Coward]

Matt Damon beat you to it.

Re:I take out Gosling's trash

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is logo? Can you point to where anyone said logo was a person, and why would you call him "something"?

Re:I take out Gosling's trash

[qxcv]

Linky

(From here)

Re:I take out Gosling's trash

[tokul]

incredibly bright programmers applying for that janitor position

And when they are discovered, they leave for their girlfriend

hmm

[nomadic]

Definitely sounds a lot more interesting than working at Google.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely sounds a lot more interesting than working at Google.

It's a geek's wet dream - well, if it had beautiful naked girls in it too.

Back to the business programming for me: data in, data out, data update, data delete, data sort, data report, *snore*

Re:hmm

[ls671]

> data in, data out, data update, data delete, data sort, data report,

sounds like a typical use case for a robot scanning the oceans...

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely sounds a lot more interesting than working at Google.

You Right ...

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

haha no. google has literally thousands of sideprojects going on akin to what he left for. a few of them are environmental projects that have to do with oceans and rainforests and such. the stuff you see in google labs is only like the top 1% of what goes on.

Re:hmm

[SnarfQuest]

Well, I always thought that Google sounded like something to do with being underwater than it does searching. Unless you are searching for naughty bits.

Can I come up to your place and google you?

Underwater Street View?

[Kylon99]

Maybe once they've started gathering data, they can share it with Google, and I can drag that Street View icon into the ocean and see what life is like down there...

Or not.

Re:Underwater Street View?

[Anonymous Coward]

The could actually implement that now. Just throw a bunch of black tiles on top of topography data. BAM! Google Ocean View.

Or were you expecting to actually see something below 100 ft?

Re:Underwater Street View?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or were you expecting to actually see something below 100 ft?

Not really; I'd probably have drowned after the first few feet.

Fail Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

3/10

Troll harder next time.

... just like Java

[ccr]

The first thing that popped out as I glanced through the post was:

"They can cross oceans.... Slowly. They only move at 1-2 knots, which is a great speed for data collection."

And I thought to myself, "slowly? .. well, it's father of Java, after all."

Re:... just like Java

[DCFusor]

Yeah, a couple knots is all Java can keep up with (if that). That garbage collection really screws up anything with realtime involved. On top of the basic slowness, that is. It's a great excuse for hardware designers to overbuild everything with tons of buffers, though.

Re:... just like Java

[Anonymous Coward]

Did Java fuck your mom or something?

Re:... just like Java

[xaoslaad]

Sysadmins are just sick of being fucked by java in general. You need jvm 1.4 for this 1.5 for that 1.6 for yet another app and soon we can add 1.7 to the monkey fucking. No 3 apps work with the same version. And forget using an IBM jre in place of a sun jre or vice versa. Q opening every jnlp with a different javaws and opening your browser with a different version of the plugin. And fuck tour life if youre going to try to load virtual media shitware from a drac imm rsa mm or ilo - nope go find a tar.gz or ff and use a 32-bit jvm in a clusterfuck setupmthat just shouldnt have to exist. Yes we get fucked by java all too much. Probably our moms too.

Now i took a java course in college and from that perspective it is great. But as a syadmin and not a developer it's a flat out pain in my nut sack.

Re:... just like Java

[Anonymous Coward]

What in the holy fuck are you talking about you ass hat! Go back to your Ars comment addiction and get the hell out of here.

Re:... just like Java

[Miamicanes]

Honestly, JVM hell is caused more by Sun's shitty documentation on how to properly specify JVM versions in a manifest or applet CLSID. Sun historically did a crap job of explaining how to specify things like, "Use the newest version of Java installed on this machine, as long as it's 1.6 (or 1.5, or 1.4) or newer", and instead gave examples that induced people to create needless dependencies on old versions of Java for no real reason besides lack of proper documentation. The fact that Oracle now owns Java makes things worse, because Oracle software was historically the worst of all about creating stupid dependencies on old versions of Java for no real reason (or because for political reasons, they wanted you to use the "thick" OCI drivers that tied you down to a specific runtime environment instead of the "thin" type 4 drivers that would "just work" on anything with a JVM).

The truth is, as long as an Oracle native-code database driver isn't involved and the developer doesn't go out of his or her way to needlessly specify some specific, arbitrary version of Java, 99.999% of anything you write in Java will work on any JVM that's as least as new as the one you compiled it under. I have 9 year old jarfiles built with pre-alpha 1.4 JDKs that still work fine under 1.6.0.${whatever}.

True story: at work, we had a notorious internal application whose development team bent over backwards to make users with newer JDKs and JREs installed miserable. Basically, it used the CLSID that told the JPI, "ignore the user's Java control panel settings, and always use the latest version of Java installed on this machine". Then, a few HTML lines later, used Javascript to commit suicide if that version of Java happened to be newer than 1.6.0.18. Sigh.

Re:... just like Java

[DiegoBravo]

For server apps I haven't had any issue when going to the last official Sun JVM (of course, avoiding the first and buggy releases like the 1.7.0 and other jre vendors.) IMO the technical issues were frequent up to the 1.3 days. The real problem I had was related to the JVM app vendor "certified version" which forced us to carry several versions at times. Of course, that's not a Java problem per se. For example, exactly the same issues arise about the operating system version. Fortunately I never had a vendor requiring C99 libs which potentially could conflict C90 apps.

BTW I totally agree about the plugin issues; seems like Sun screwed the thing for ever.

Re:... just like Java

[dshk]

I accept that what you wrote is your experience. In the last 10 years I had no problems with upgrading Java from 1.2 to 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 and then 1.6 for our web application. I also used several versions of Apache Tomcat, even the predecessor of it, Apache JServ and another one, I don't even remember. It runs both on Windows and Linux. I never had to change a single line because of the upgrades. For me it was really a "write once, run everywhere" experience. With our client application, there are occasional problems with some specific Java bugfix versions on some client computers, but the client has a few hundred thousands deployment base.

Re:... just like Java

[codepunk]

Not this sysadmin, I frigging love java it is the greatest platform in existence. Not really it is rather damn stupid to run a vm to abstract the hardware when everyone runs it on the same architecture.

The real reason I love it is it takes a ass ton of hardware to run even the most simplistic applications. It may be a pain in my nut sack but my wallet frigging loves java.

Re:... just like Java

[TheRaven64]

That garbage collection really screws up anything with realtime involved

I'm sure David F Bacon, who wrote an realtime GC for Java for embedded applications almost a decade ago, will be fascinated to hear that.

Re:... just like Java

[sproketboy]

Careful, the slashdot crowd will mod you down for truth.

Re:... just like Java

[Anonymous Coward]

he wrote an realtime garbgae collection?
truly an hero

Re:... just like Java

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 2011... why people think that "java is slow" jokes are still funny? Java's JIT is so advanced that execution speed for java and native code has been irrelevant for almost all kind of software systems for a while now.

quit saying the cloud

[Osgeld]

unless the entire fucking thing sits in your couple of boxes at the lab where the data is actually going.

Re:quit saying the cloud

[ls671]

It's a startup maybe they are really using the cloud...

Re:quit saying the cloud

[Osgeld]

first of there is no "the cloud" theres google's cloud apples cloud amazon's cloud ubuntu's cloud the cloud is meaningless

Re:quit saying the cloud

[ThatsMyNick]

Okay, make that "a cloud". Now it could be anybody's cloud. Happy?

Re:quit saying the cloud

[ls671]

Nowadays, almost every big provider is using the word "cloud" to offer small to medium companies managed services and they even propose it to bigger corporations. "The cloud" is a lot more convenient for them because it means that you do not know where your data is located.

As for "the cloud is meaningless", well not exactly, it is just less precise. You could say:
-The Ford engine blew up
-The Mercedes-Benz engine blew up
or just: The engine blew up

Same for the cloud:
-The Google cloud
-The Amazon cloud
or just: the cloud

Plus what is telling you they do not have peering agreement to use each other resources and both save money on operating cost ? ;-)
http://xkcd.com/908/

What do you wanna bet...

[interval1066]

...that the REAL reason Gosling left was because the google execs were like "Ok Jimmy, here's your office, lets tuck you in... all nice and comfy? Good... now just rest here until we need you." I think the coolness of having the inventor of Java trolling 'round the office was greater than any expectation that he'd actually invent something for Google.

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[Bing Tsher E]

My theory is that he needed a place of refuge after Larry's barbarians took over his company. For someone of Gosling's standing, a short term job at Google could be used as a lateral move. So he took the time to figure out what he really wanted to do and has now found it.

Google gains from the prestige of having hired him, and now he's free to do what he really wanted.

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[martin-boundary]

I doubt it. If you read Gosling interviews from the past few years, one of the ideas he likes to talk about a lot over and over is embedding millions of sensors into the world - in roads, walls, etc. Tiny little bugs that measure something, which can be combined into a completely novel picture of the world.

That's not really what Google does, they're an advertising company whose primary inputs are words and human behaviours.

The first is closer to hands on lab work, while the second is pure data munging, and my impression is Gosling's not that interested in the latter.

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[Anonymous Coward]

What did you expect Gosling to magically produce at [insert_company]? Language inventors aren't known for creativity. Most spend their life energy on a personal quest for the programmer's Holy Grail. Compare him to a counterpart, Bjarne Stroustrup. Bjarne knows the finer details of C++ better than anyone. But compared to other renowned C++ programmers, Bjarne is not considered a brilliant C++ programmer by many.

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of trolling, I think both parties were mutually interested in trolling Oracle.

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[Anonymous Coward]

The image of Larry, Sergey, and Eric tucking "Jimmy" Gosling into his retirement-home-ish office / bedroom / pasture is pretty funny. Thanks for that.

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this man informative!

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[TubeSteak]

I was in Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD) a few months ago and sitting right behind me was a salesman from Liquid Robotics* giving his pitch to a potential client.

I'll admit, I listened in. The technology he was describing sounded amazing.
Alternative solutions are crazy expensive or have limited range/loitering/real-time capabilities,
while this thing can stay out more or less indefinitely if you pay for a big enough battery pack.

I recall something that a quick google search doesn't turn up in any articles:
The salesman mentioned that Liquid Robotics keeps their costs down by contracting fishing boats to drop off and pick up the Wave Gliders. Because, while you could wait for it to come home at 1.5 knots/hr, it's a lot faster (and not very expensive) to have it swim to/from a spot that someone was going to be at anyways.

By the time I had to leave, I was ready to buy one and I don't even need it.
I seriously feel that their technology is going to be the future of unattended oceanographic research
and if I had a million dollars to invest, I would.

*I never actually caught the name of the company, but from the /. summary, I immediately recognized the technology being described.

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[c0lo]

Tiny little bugs that measure something, which can be combined into a completely novel picture of the world.

Google doesn't do it yet at full scale, they're an advertising company whose primary inputs are words and human behaviours.

FTFY (remember Google maps with satellite pictures?)

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[DigiShaman]

Money can corrupt one's vision of what they really want in life. Once he figures out how much money he can earn by scanning and selling side scan bathymetry data, he'll make a killing reselling this to the oil and gas industry. But then again, I suspect that's his real goal. The Gulf of Mexico is rather convenient isn't it? Not that it hasn't already been mapped before, but high resolution data that's up-to-date is always in demand.

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[Anonymous Coward]

See, mods! This is what happens when you get this confused with that.

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[Anonymous Coward]

On power, I heard a talk a few months ago on ultra-low-power computing. The application being focused on in the talk was computers small enough to be injected into a person's bloodstream, but it generally applied to any ~1 mm sq or so computers. They talked about the power usage of a computer in terms of how many years it could run on a tiny, tiny battery that you could actually attach to such a tiny computer, which seems ridiculous when I am used to the idea of charging a device every day or at least every week. (Of course, these were very slow computers which were usually in sleep mode. The focus of the talk was how to make sleep mode use orders of magnitude less power at the cost of making regular computation take double the power or something like that.)

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[gl4ss]

"I doubt it. If you read Gosling interviews from the past few years, one of the ideas he likes to talk about a lot over and over is embedding millions of sensors into the world - in roads, walls, etc. Tiny little bugs that measure something, which can be combined into a completely novel picture of the world."

yeah, billions of devices everywhere running java all talking to each other, straight out of sun's marketing for the past decade.

except that at google it's not java. but it is. but it isn't. but it's dalvik. but it's really .java. but it isn't java, but is.. so maybe, just maybe, he couldn't move that to where he wanted at google so might just as well go fishing - and maybe google had quarantined him from actually doing much in that front, to avoid more legal hassle with oracle.

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[Syberz]

Makes you wonder why he went to the big G in the first place, well, besides the dump truck full of money dropped off at his doorstep of course.

Re:What do you wanna bet...

[gad_zuki!]

>That's not really what Google does, they're an advertising company whose primary inputs are words and human behaviours.

Really? Then explain google maps or google street view. Or the big google book scanning going on. Or android and all its sensors. Or how I can see local traffic (more sensors) on my google maps.

Google is a lot of things and I think the idea of using new sensors and new information to paint a new picture of reality is pretty high on their list. I imagine Gosling's big issue is the massive amounts of money needed to do this, the massive privacy issues, and defining what kind of sensors to put where. Hell, every Apsie nerd completely lost his shit over google's wifi sniffing. "ZOMG they are collecting our SSIDs!!!!!!!!!!!" Usually, its the geeks who are the biggest luddites.

Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe now people will forget he ever did anything with computers and kick Java to the curb.
It was nothing special back in '95 when I first looked at it and it's nothing special now.

Can we all please move on?

Re:Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess we can't all be prodigious creators of excellence like you...

Re:Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Here here! Anyone with half a brain knows Ruby is the future of programming. It does everything faster and with more precision and expressiveness than any other language. Java, C/C++, Python, all these idiotic moron languages that are too complex for anyone to understand properly will fall by the wayside as Ruby takes over.

Re:Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you can't.
I've written the graphics back-ends for numerous console games that have sold millions of copies.
Back in '95 the V.P. of the division asked me to evaluate it to see if the company needed to jump on it.
My response after doing some research was "It's just another programming language. If we care about things it's good at we should use it, but we don't."
That was back when I was doing the streaming AV engine for kids games, writing custom codecs for video compression.

I'm no Knuth, t but I've designed and written some pretty amazing things in the last twenty four years.

Re:Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for you. Don't be a douchebag about it.

Re:Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's the fun in that?

Gosling leaving?

[the_humeister]

So, that means Kate is staying then?

No change

[jdavidb]

Now he's just doing Google Streetview underwater!

Re:No change

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand the "growing fleet of autonomous vehicles that roves the ocean collecting data" is going to be gathering and storing wifi data.

Re:No change

[Anonymous Coward]

If you check the blog post you see that there is no "underwater" involved : http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/i_ve_moved_again
And i doubt that GPS or WiMAX is working underwater ;)

Re:No change

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now he's just doing Google Streetview underwater!"

Oh, you mean Google Inundation?

Re:No change

[Adm.Wiggin]

I will be laughing when Google buys out this new company to get him back.

Re:No change

[jdavidb]

I'm sure Gosling will be laughing all the way to the bank, too.

Google buying this project seriously wouldn't surprise me. Or becoming a customer and purchasing the data.

100% on his own project, the downside?

[perpenso]

So you are saying the normal Google employee gets to work on what they want 20% of the time but Gosling would get to work on what he wants 100% of the time in his comfy Google office, what is the downside you care claiming for him to be at Google? :-)

Too evil:

[Hartree]

"Gosling has left the building!"

Re:Too evil:

[Jonner]

Naw, he just jumped ship to a much cooler form of evil: aquatic robots ready to take over the world.

Re:Too evil:

[Hartree]

Robotic sharks. With frickin lasers!

Re:Too evil:

[Anonymous Coward]

Too evil?

The guy invented java! cmon

Re:Too evil:

[Hartree]

You must not have had a google+ account. (Note the past tense.)

gold in them there oceans

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine autonomous undersea robots scanning the ocean floor for the 1000's of sunken vessels long unreachable by treasure hunters. At $2000+ an ounce one of those little robots could earn it's keep by finding just one bar of gold....

Re:gold in them there oceans

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are highly optimistic and don't really have a clue about how expensive these things are to run. You think it's going to bring the gold up for you? Then who will? And what about the other robots that find nothing? Do these robots got that deep? What if someone else hacks them and finds that gold before you do? And why did you write it is when its is what you needed?

Is this the guy from...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Jon & Kate Plus 8? Man I'm gonna miss him in that show, he was the most talented member!

Follow the money!

[Anachragnome]

It could be he simply realized there was more money in creating off-the-shelf technologies before the Navy does it themselves, and simply contracting out his little data-sniffers for huge sums.

UAVs(Unmanned Aquatic Vehicle), anyone?

The Water Cycle - Smart

[Master Moose]

"They have a growing fleet of autonomous vehicles that roves the ocean collecting data from a variety of onboard sensors and uploading it to the cloud"

Utilising the natural formation of clouds from the ocean. Collecting it again no doubt when it rains.

Imagine the future where we can all harness this sort of force of nature. I cant wait for the (bit)torrential downloads. Irene will be nothing.

Autonomous data-collecting robots.

[devphaeton]

I don't blame him. The robots sound like an awesome project, IMHO. When I was a kid (say 11 or 12, so mid-1980s) I used to dream of something similar. I drew up all kinds of plans and pictures and routes of autonomous robotic water craft that would run on sea water and traverse the Pacific ocean from my home state to Japan and back.

Were I him, I would be all up in this stuff. Just saying.

Re:Autonomous data-collecting robots.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you still want to build AUVs, it's never too late. I do underwater robotics as a hobby and will help in any way I can.

GerryAUVGuy@gmail.com

Re:Autonomous data-collecting robots.

[Anonymous Coward]

Jimmy was just a bit preceding generation for goo (gray hair you know). But he's really into the next big thing here. There is a link in TFA, but for those to lazy to RTFA: http://liquidr.com/. If you really want to know what the real folks are doing check out:
http://www.auvsi.org/Home/

Re:Autonomous data-collecting robots.

[c0lo]

I drew up all kinds of plans and pictures and routes of autonomous robotic water craft that would run on sea water and traverse the Pacific ocean from my home state to Japan and back.

Let me guess: your parents moved in Montana shortly afterwards, amiright?

Re:Autonomous data-collecting robots.

[dudpixel]

No kidding.

Everyone's talking about reasons for leaving Google, as if Google is a bad employer.

Lets put thing in perspective here...

A job at Google would be great as far as large companies go. Good work-life balance, great work conditions, great benefits etc.

But come on, he's going to be working on high-tech robots! Nothing is cooler for a developer (well, most anyway) than robotics!

I dont blame him at all!!

Underwater research, hmm?

[lennier]

I suppose Google hasn't also just started a project codenamed Azorian?

Java

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA "They can cross oceans.... Slowly." Perhaps they are already running Java?

Suspended

[BluBall]

Truth is that he was suspended for failing to sufficiently prove he was *the* James Gosling quickly enough.

once you hit it big, you can be this scaterbrained

[buback]

If I told my parents I was leaving google to go start my own undersea data collecting company, they'd look askance at one another and wonder what type of mid-life crisis i was having. But I guess once you start something like java, you get free rein to do whatever-the-hell crazy-assed thing you want, even if it means leaving a steady job behind, and nobody thinks it's that crazy.

Can you say "Hazard to Navigation"?

[SwedishChef]

A bunch of autonomous boats moving around the ocean at 2.5 knots with no one or nothing on watch seems a bit dangerous to me. I know most of you think there are nothing but container ships on the oceans but there are about 3,000 cruising sailboats with families aboard out there on vessels that are at risk of these sorts of unmanned vessels. These are often in the 30-foot range and seldom have the power to run radar all night. Most of them keep a lookout but I wonder if these "autonomous" boats have navigational lights showing at night.

Re:Can you say "Hazard to Navigation"?

[macshit]

The "autonomous boats" are very small, and most of the mass is actually a fair distance below the surface, tethered to a surface float. If there's a collision, even with a very small ocean-going sailboat, it seems very likely that the sailboat is going to win...

You can look at Liquid Robotic's (brief) Waver Glider specifications page for a bit more detail (mostly in this PDF file).

Re:Can you say "Hazard to Navigation"?

[Anonymous Coward]

The surface float is 2 meters long and probably light weight enough that it doesn't constitute a hazard. The tether to the underwater part might foul your prop, but I'll bet it's lightweight enough to just break. The admiralty law aspects of such things are complex. It's not a buoy or vessel, so it doesn't need to show lights/flags/etc. Google "admiralty law UAV" to get a bunch of interesting hits.

Re:Can you say "Hazard to Navigation"?

[Anonymous Coward]

From their point of view, it's in their best interest to keep the gizmos afloat. They've probably got bumpers, and colliding with them would be like hitting a tree branch or other sea garbage. Worst things it could do is scratch the paint, or nick the propeller.

Re:Can you say "Hazard to Navigation"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Further, they are shy by design and will attempt to move away from you.... [I'm not kidding...]

Re:once you hit it big, you can be this scaterbrai

[macshit]

Er, yes, once you become super famous and renowned, the concept of a "steady job" loses some of its allure, and you can do cool-but-risky things instead if you want to. The parameters of your risk equation change. But note that such behavior is not at all uncommon even amongst the non-famous — I know tons of people who left "secure" jobs with big companies to join startups — though it's easier when you're young (e.g., no family to support), and perhaps somewhat more attractive for the middle-aged (there's a sense of "now or never").

You can hardly blame Gosling — he's spent 20 years as "big name at big company", with all the crap that entails (even at "good" big companies), and is probably quite sick of it by now. Given that he does have the ability to do more quirky and interesting things without undue personal risk, and apparently hadn't put down any roots at Google, it doesn't seem particularly surprising that he made this choice.

But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't he leave months ago. I think the news is that he has a new gig.

Wave Glider

[Animats]

I've met some of the Wave Glider people. The things already have an Iridium uplink, and can be given waypoint lists to follow. They generally stay within about 50 meters of the desired track. They're simple, robust, and effective. They've been sent from Hawaii to Monterey Bay, then up to Alaska and back. The only powered moving part is the rudder. See the link above for how they move.

I don't know what they need Gosling for, though. Their present software seems to be quite effective.

...and uploading it to the cloud

[FreakyGreenLeaky]

I hate these buzzwords. For me to take the time to reply to this story in cyberspace shows how much I hate buzzwords.

Yeah

[bytesex]

I'd hate for those robots to be uploading their data into some stupid old server. Thank god they're uploading it into the cloud. That's much better.

Re:once you hit it big, you can be this scaterbrai

[Anonymous Coward]

He is clearly well off financially, and does not really need that "steady job" you mentioned.

What really would be crazy and scatterbrained would be to continue working with something if you don't need to, when there is something else you could do that you would enjoy more. Assuming that he is more interested in this new job (which certainly sounds plausible - it seems to be some _really_ fun technology), he is doing exactly the right thing. I wish him all the best with his new job - he has certainly earned it :).

Left eh?

[DarkOx]

Come on its obvious Gosling was forced out to make room for Cmdr Taco

CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled

[higuita]

check the java parameter -XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled

it enable the unused class unloading ... but i think that this changed in new versions

Re:once you hit it big, you can be this scaterbrai

[kangsterizer]

wah
undersea data collecting IS interesting, challenging, something worth working for.

working for Google just to, like, work at Google should be the reasonable choice here? Heck, work is where you spent the very major part of your life, so it better be something you value. I would totally do the same as he's doing. In fact, I would very much like to work for such a company that's actually doing something interesting.

SPOT

[jDeepbeep]

would be interesting to see what they bring forth instead

possibly Spot

Gone to a DOD Company - U.S. Citizens Only

[fygment]

He's gone to a cool little company: Liquid Robotics - http://liquidr.com/. Check out the careers section and you'll find that only US citizens need apply. Not surprisingly there must be some very interesting DOD applications for the technology. Nothing wrong with that, just a bit disappointing somehow.

Re:Gone to a DOD Company - U.S. Citizens Only

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. Did they make an exception for Canadian Gosling or did he get American citizenship somewhere along the way?

Re:once you hit it big, you can be this scaterbrai

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're in the position that you have to look to your parents for approval then you don't realize what it is to be free of traditional confines. And don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with pleasing the parents. It's actually a fantastic goal in a stable family. But when you hit a certain level of comfort in your own abilities you really shouldn't be looking to others for their approval.
 
The man is successful. He wants to spread his wings and take on new challenges. Is that really something we should be second guessing in another person's life? That's part of the problem with what goes on today. Too many people live in their comfort zone for too long. It makes society stagnate. Society as a whole suffers for it.

An interesting but not unexpected trend

[kriston]

It sounds cliche but sometimes the most-talked-about place in town isn't really the best place in town.

I have observed this among many former colleagues who go to the next big thing (FB, GOOG, etc.) but leave after less than one year.

I note the trend others have noticed that folks who leave MSFT for the most-talked-about place in town actually return to MSFT.

Re:once you hit it big, you can be this scaterbrai

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? That's your first thought?... What would my parents think? You street-toughs just ain't got no sense

Gosling

[Anonymous Coward]

Liquid Robotics' CEO is Bill Vass, who was the head of Sun Federal before it (and all of Sun...) got Larryed

mod informative

[gl4ss]

mod informative, but can't moderate on this thread.

this sort of thing is why I read slashdot, courses etc never touch stuff like this.

(I like java and it can be used memory sparingly and written tightly and good for nice dynamic tricks, but goddamn if any industry frameworks are like that..)

Obligatory

[rubypossum]

And nothing of value was lost.