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