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Java Creator James Gosling Joins Amazon Web Services (geekwire.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the welcome-to-the-family dept.

The legendary computer scientist and founder of Java, James Gosling, is joining forces with Amazon Web Services. Gosling made the announcement today on Facebook saying that he's "starting a new Adventure" with the cloud computing juggernaut as a Distinguished Engineer. GeekWire reports: Gosling wrote Java, one of the most widely used programming languages in the history of computing, while at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. After leaving Sun following its acquisition by Oracle, Gosling did a short stint at Google before settling in for almost six years at Liquid Robotics, which is working on an autonomous boat called the Wave Glider. He likely ruffled a few feathers in Seattle last year after speaking out about fears of cloud vendor lock-in. "You get cloud providers like Amazon saying: 'Take your applications and move them to the cloud.' But as soon as you start using them you're stuck in that particular cloud," he said at IP Expo according to The Inquirer, echoing the sentiment of some skeptical IT organizations burned by enterprise vendors in the past.

13 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. I guess the pay is good... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    for him to go back on his ideals like this. I would never work for Amazon after so many of my friends were worked nearly to death and then bitten by dogs in their office. Stressed-out and lack of sleep is something dogs notice, and that greatly increases the chances of getting bitten.

    1. Re: I guess the pay is good... by fluffernutter · · Score: 2

      Amazon is what unions were fighting against. Like them or hate them, Amazon is what we get in an environment with weaker unions.

      --
      Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    2. Re: I guess the pay is good... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Funny

      Amazon is what we get in an environment with weaker unions.

      Well, Java doesn't have unions at all. Gosling explicitly excluded them from the language.

    3. Re: I guess the pay is good... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Amazon pays more productive workers more so I guess that is why lazy union workers hate them. For me, I've worked for Amazon since early 1996 and haven't had a single weekday off. I think I've taken six weekends off in that over twenty-one years. I would hate to see some lazy union member make as much as me.

    4. Re: I guess the pay is good... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's really too bad that Amazon are the only high-tech shop in the world - that workers don't have the option of taking their services to another company with better policies

  2. Java - the most awful programming language ever by kugeln · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So AWS is going to start crashing from running out of memory, spawning too many processes, or trying to run native, platform optimized binaries that only work on a specific antiquated version of the platform. Talk about progress!

    1. Re:Java - the most awful programming language ever by gl4ss · · Score: 3, Insightful

      it's not a bad language and the vm's arent that bad. ..a lot of the stuff people make with it is bad though. a lot of the frameworks and stuff people use it is pretty bad though. ..like, needing 10 lines of code to interface something that goes into kilobytes of something to CALL A METHOD YOU COULD JUST HAVE CALLED DIRECTLY YOURSELF.

      doesn't really help that experts recommend using libraries and frameworks when they are completely unnecessary(usually written by them - googles android division does this one quite a lot.. so much they can't even explain why themselves or why you should use their way instead).

      also, bollocks of bollocks of more stuff to make things "easier", like plugging in an event system to call a method when you could just call the method directly. here's a hint: you shouldn't use reflection as basis of how your programs logic is going to run - it's just STUPID.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  3. Tough crowd tonight... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Does this mean that Amazon will support vendor-neutral implementation of their cloud?

  4. Legendary by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Legendary for Gosling Emacs, preceding GNU Emacs which copied liberally from it. The fact that he sold it to UniPress which later requested Stallman remove Gosling's code from GNU Emacs was the impetus for Stallman to create the GPL.

    1. Re:Legendary by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Informative

      You can actually look at the Gosling source code here. It was a library for drawing updates to the screen (with a dynamic programming library), and actually the source code got shared and was being used in a lot of places, not just emacs. That was the main thing Stallman had to rewrite, and when he did, he ended up making it more efficient.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  5. Re:should have hired someone else by buss_error · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Maybe hire someone younger who has new ideas and is likely to invent the next big thing. Not some old fart that is going to sit around with his grand title while people worship his decades old accomplishments.

    I get that sort of attitude at times from the younger folks I work with. Like the time they wanted to run a Ethernet connection a few thousand feet on a fence with repeaters. "Hum, guys, we get a lot of electrical noise from the substation next door and lighting around here. Might want to explore fibre." No no! they said. Every thing will be fine they said. After replacing a few Cisco routers over a year's time, they -ahem- installed fibre.

    Or the time I said "Hey, let's not use discrete LEDs for that, let's use a matrix" Company went bankrupt when our competitors used -ahem- matrices.

    Or maybe read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    Or maybe realize that it isn't chronological time the ossifies brains, but complacency, lack of ambition, lack of team work, and a lack of being open to ideas of others and doesn't have anything at all to do with how old someome is.

    On the flip side of that, someone told me I was doing something wrong. Before I opened my mouth to say "Sonny boy, I've been doing this thirty years!" I thought about their criticism and realized that I had, in fact, been doing it wrong for 30 years. I was pretty damned embarrassed.

    We all, in fact, live exactly the same length of time - right now. We don't live yesterday, we don't live tomorrow. We live right now.

    Just sayin'.

    --
    Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
  6. adventure time! by wept · · Score: 2

    everything has to be a fucking "adventure" now.

  7. Re: Java - the most awful programming language eve by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Don't correct him. He's obviously someone still stuck on antiquated programming languages from the 1970s or 1980s that don't offer threads. He goes with what he knows.