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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

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Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#2

Post by mark_l_watson »

Right on, James Gosling's work is amazing, and he and the whole Java ecosystem have my gratitude: I went to the first Java World Tour conference and wrote a little blog article about it that was linked on Sun's home Java page for about a year. I was very lucky, and since I was the first search hit for 'Java consultant' for a very long time that gave my wife and I the freedom to live in a rural area and I could get remote work for a decade.

As long as I am expressing gratitude, I would also like to call out the Clojure team for developing a wonderful ecosystem in top of Java and the JVM.

It must be wonderful to do work that positively affects the lives of millions of people.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#4

Post by jgneff »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #2

Right on, James Gosling's work is amazing, and he and the whole Java ecosystem have my gratitude: I went to the first Java World Tour conference and wrote a little blog article about it that was linked on Sun's home Java page for about a year. I was very lucky, and since I was the first search hit for 'Java consultant' for a very long time that gave my wife and I the freedom to live in a rural area and I could get re…

I am also very grateful to James Gosling. I was working with C++ at Taligent (an Apple, IBM, and HP joint venture) in the fall of 1995 when I first downloaded Java to give it a try. I literally jumped up and down with joy after writing my first "Hello, World" program. It was such a breath of fresh air compared to the Taligent CommonPoint application framework we were building.

I took the severance package when Taligent imploded, dropped everything I was doing at the time, and have been working with Java and its related software ever since.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#7

Post by exabrial »

Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby.

Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable. And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), it's just pressing control-space all day and you're fine.

Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV, till you understand whats happening. Again, not perfect, but a good tradeoff.

What do you get for all of these tradeoffs? Speed, memory safety. But with that you still still have dynamic invocation capabilities (making things like interception possible) and hotswap/live redefinition (things that C/CPP cannot do).

Perfect? No, but very practical for the real world use case.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#8

Post by hackthemack »

cloudking wrote: post #5

Why is Java so popular in enterprise?

I worked in IT from the 90s to today. My perspective is it grew and grew because Sun supported it, then IBM supported it, RedHat supported it. It had the glimmer that it was the "Enterprise Way" of doing "Real IT" programming for "Real Businesses". I am not saying any of that is the "Truth", just the perception that was held by the majority of people who could choose what to write enterprise code in.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#10

Post by mpalfrey »

cloudking wrote: post #5

Why is Java so popular in enterprise?

Decent talent pool.

Decent tooling. Been around for long enough that a lot of the quirks of it are well known and documented. Basically it's a blue collar programming language without too many gotchas. Modern(ish) day Cobol.

(I'm predominantly a Java dev still, even after diversions over the years to Javascript, Python and C#).

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