Ken Thompson, Guido Von Rossum, James Gosling : Good going Google.
Rob Pike, Vint Cerf, Peter Norvig
James Gosling joining Google
111–116 of 116 posts
Re: James Gosling joining Google
#112Re: James Gosling joining Google
#113Re: James Gosling joining Google
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tcl was the 'language to beat' amongst the new language products. Self was the 'language like no other' (or a totally new way to express what you wanted to a computer). Java was the 'language that re-used code'. C++ was kind of a joke (remember this was the late 80's, early 90's) since it took a perfectly acceptable language, C, and made writing code harder, more error prone, and less likely to produce correct code (…
Tcl didn't play in that space, and to their credit I don't think the Tcl folks were willing to go there just to ride the buzz. That's not entirely true. I don't recall the exact timeline, but there was a Tcl plugin for Netscape which could be viewed as playing in much the same space as Java or Flash. A bit of work on media display and animation, and it might well have taken the space that Flash came to dominate. Unli…
The exact time line is that after Java became the surprise success that it was, the Tcl team responded with 'well yeah, we could do that too.' In Oct 1996 Jacob Levy announced 1.0 of the Tcl plugin [1]. Oracle has eradicated all of the www.sunlabs.com content in the internet archive AFAICT so it is not possible to see when Sun Labs went public with it, but it happened several months after the Java 1.0 release which came out in Navigator in September of 1995.
As I recall the sentiment was 'So you can run it inside a browser, what is the big deal with that?' I don't know if Jacob lurks here but he would be the definitive source.
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1996SepOct/0090...
Re: James Gosling joining Google
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, that's too many cooks. They all want different things. Guido is interested primarily in usability, and Python is notoriously poor in performance. Rob Pike writes systems languages. With Java, Gosling has written a very enterprise-friendly language, that drags C++ halfway to Lisp.
I think that Guido probably has his plate full with the open revolt over the transition to version 3. Javascript is much closer to a halfway point to Lisp than Java. I don't really see Java as being at all similar to Lisp... witness the 3-4 year (possibly longer) debacle trying to get closures into the language. Talk about banging a square rhinoceros into a round hole. Java's point of greatest similarity to C++ is un…
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Re: James Gosling joining Google
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thought I should point out MS also has quite a concentration of languages folks that were famous before joining MS: Butler Lampson, Erik Meijer, Herb Sutter, Burton Smith, Anders Hejlsberg
+1 for Anders Hejlsberg. He created Turbo Pascal, Delphi and C# - that's 3 very successful languages/development platforms.
He created Turbo Pascal and Delphi when he was young and hungry. C# when he was well-fed and older. Not hungry in any way. Thus the over-engineering and bloat-ware.