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Interviews: Ask James Gosling About Java and Ocean Exploring Robots
James Gosling is probably best known for creating the Java programming language while working at Sun Microsystems. Currently, he is the chief software architect at Liquid Robotics. Among other projects, Liquid Robotics makes the Wave Glider, an autonomous, environmentally powered marine robot. James has agreed to take a little time from the oceangoing robots and answer any questions you have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
You're thrown into a gladiatorial ring. An audience of thousands watches your every move, eager for blood. Across the ring, Richard Stallman advances toward you, katana poised to attack. To your left you see a rack full of medieval weapons.
What weapon do you choose? Whose blood will be spilled upon the sand?
Everything is better with chainsaws.
In terms of code development, it is a long way to look back to the days of Pascal and VAX. Someday we likely will look back at JAVA in the same way. Have the limits of JAVA been reached and do you see that day of obsolescence as being sooner than later?
What one feature of the Java language would you go back and do differently if you could?
What do you think of Oracle's stewardship of Java so far?
In 1996, you collaborated with Henry McGilton to write The Java Language Environment, which describes your rationale for the design decisions you've made in creating Java. In this document, you expouse a number of ideas which are (or at least at the time were) controversial, like the "constant-in-class pattern" in favoring enumerations (which later became supported in Java 1.5), the lack of need for structure or union types, the lack of need for unsigned integral types (well, except for char), and the lack of need for operator overloading. Now that 17 years have passed since that document was published, have you changed your stance on any of these decisions?