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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

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Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#101

Post by fpoling »

cogman10 wrote: post #27
brightball wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I got out of college and was still firmly in the "Java is the solution to everything" mentality I didn't realize that my admiration was really for the JVM and the Java App Server tooling that was so much more advanced than anything else at the time. It was basically Docker + K8s for anything running on the JVM more than 2 decades earlier. Java the language eventually drove me away because the productivity was so…

Let me extol the virtues of Java the language. You can take pretty much any code written for Java 1.0 and you can still build and run it on Java 24. There are exceptions (sun.misc.Unsafe usage, for example) but they are few and far between. Moreso than nearly any other language backwards compatibility has been key to java. Heck, there's a pretty good chance you can take a jar compiled for 1.0 and still use it to this…

I have C++ code from 1997 that I occasionally compile. So far it runs. 10 yeas ago compiling with -Wall exposed an inconsequential bug and that was it. I suspect when it stops to compile it will be from an absence of a particular X11 library that I used to parse a config in otherwise command-line utility.

Which also points to another thing where Java compatibility shines. One can have a GUI application that is from nineties and it still runs. It can be very ugly especially on a high DPI screen, but still one can use it.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#102

Post by w10-1 »

Java is a great success story. Though, to be fair, James Gosling was the spark but has not been the steward.

Even as early as Java 1.1 and 1.2 he was not particularly involved in making runtime, library, or even language decisions, and later he wasn't the key to generics, etc.

Mark Reinhold has been the hand's-on lead since 1.1, first integrating early JIT's, HotSpot, the 1.2 10X class explosion, and has been running the team all the way through Oracle's purchase, making the JVM suitable for dynamic language like Kotlin and Clojure, open-sourcing, moving to a faster release cadence, pushing JVM method and field handles that form the basis for modern language features, migrating between GC's, and on and on.

As far as I can tell, everything that makes Java great has come down to Mark Reinhold pushing and guiding.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#103

Post by paulddraper »

zwnow wrote: post #95
hintymad wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), Java's tools are really top notch. Using IntelliJ for Java feels a whole new different world from using IDEs for other languages. Speaking of Go, does anyone know why Go community is not hot on developing containers for concurrent data structures? I see Mutex this and lock that scattering in Go code, while in Java community the #1 advice on w…

Just implement concurrency with actors and u save up on some locks and mutexes... The patterns are available, its up to the community to apply proper concurrency patterns.

The x86 instruction set is available as well.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#104

Post by Koshkin »

lamp_book wrote: post #78
aabajian wrote: post #37

Just going to remind y'all of this: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java... I went to a Java school. I remember my operating systems class involved writing simulated OS code in Java (for example, round robin for context switching). The argument was that it would be easier to understand the algorithms if the hardware complexities were minimized. I understand that sentiment, but I don't think Ja…

My school started us off in microcontroller programming in C then Java for intro to data structures and OOP then back to C (and MIPS assembly) for systems/OS/concurrency. One thing I appreciate Java over Python for DS/Algo is the clear delineation between abstract data type and underlying data structure - IMO is easy to get a wrong mental model with Python. But teaching OS concepts in Java seems a little crazy to me.

Hm... Why? Java seems to be a perfect language in which to understand things at a conceptual level!

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#105

Post by rootbear »

When Gosling was at Sun, he was one of two principal architects of the NeWS Window system. The X Window system was designed for "dumb" display devices and so the display elements were all static, not requiring much work from the server. NeWS was designed to run on a (Sun) workstation, where there was a lot of computational power available, so it was based on Postscript. A NeWS client would send a program to the server, not just static commands.

Gosling, unsurprisingly, designed Java with the NeWS model in mind, where web pages were programs, not just static HTML documents. When I got him to sign my copy of "The Java Programming Language", I asked him if Java was the revenge of NeWS. He just smiled.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#106

Post by nelup20 »

I personally appreciate Java (and the JVM) much more after having tried other languages/ecosystems that people kept saying were so much better than Java. Instead, I just felt like it was a "the grass is greener" every time. The only other language that I felt was an actual massive improvement is Rust (which so far has been a joy to work with).

It's a shame imo that it's not seen as a "cool" option for startups, because at this point, the productivity gap compared to other languages is small, if nonexistent.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#107

Post by AStonesThrow »

rootbear wrote: post #105

When Gosling was at Sun, he was one of two principal architects of the NeWS Window system. The X Window system was designed for "dumb" display devices and so the display elements were all static, not requiring much work from the server. NeWS was designed to run on a (Sun) workstation, where there was a lot of computational power available, so it was based on Postscript. A NeWS client would send a program to the serve…

The corollary of this was Display PostScript. At my first job we had a SPARCStation 2 with a SPARCprinter. The SPARCStation was a mighty wonder to behold, with a storage pedestal and a lovely OpenWindows GUI on a luxurious Sun monitor and color framebuffer. The operator sitting at the desk was often just a novice clerical worker, but we ran a few Internet services on the machine as well. However, our department depended on that SPARCprinter to spit out hundreds of sheets of paper daily.

We could not depend on the printer to stay functional, though. Have you heard of a Winmodem? SPARCprinters were essentially that: they were configured as a "dumb display device" where all the imaging logic was contained in the software and run on the server. A page was written in PostScript, rendered on the print server, and dispatched to the printer as if it were a framebuffer/monitor.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the server software was not so reliable, or the printer hardware wasn't reliable, and because of this peculiar symbiotic parasitism, whenever our printer wedged, our server was also toast. Every process went into "D" for device wait; load averages spiked and all our work ground to a halt. We would need to pull the worker off the desktop, reboot the whole server, and start over with the printer.

That printer haunted my dreams, all though my transition from clerk, to network operator, to sysadmin, and it wasn't until 2011 when I was able to reconcile with printers in general. I still miss SunOS 4 and the whole SPARC ecosystem, but good riddance to Display PostScript.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#108

Post by Koshkin »

kccqzy wrote: post #89
whartung wrote: post #75

Ode to Java. Boy, I love Java. When I switched jobs way back, a condition was that the new project was going be using Java. GC. Single file modules. No "forward". The Collection suite. Fast compiles. The magic of the ClassLoader. The ClassLoader, that was insightful. I don't know how much thought went into that when they came up with it, but, wow. That ClassLoader is behind a large swath of Java magic. It really hasn…

The servlet really is a powerful concept behind a bad name. I've seen more than once where people reinvent servlets in other languages.

Also, λs and μservices...

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#109

Post by [deleted] »

exabrial wrote: post #92
toprerules wrote: post #36

I admire Java as a success story, but I still have a deeply ingrained aversion to it for many reasons. I will admit that many of the reasons are due to Java's legacy as the language of bloated corporations, and its creation of overly verbose, magic fueled frameworks and poorly written code. Java as a language goes hand in hand with the idea that code is coal to be shoveled into the furnace, and we should all throw ou…

>My other issues with the JVM is how much of a black box it is from a platform perspective, which makes debugging a PITA Java has one the greatest debugging capabilities ever. dynamic breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, hell you can ever restart a stack frame after hot deploying code without a restart. You can overwrite any variable in memory, set uncaught exception breakpoints, and even have the JVM wait for a deb…

[deleted]

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#110

Post by AnimalMuppet »

cogman10 wrote: post #27
brightball wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I got out of college and was still firmly in the "Java is the solution to everything" mentality I didn't realize that my admiration was really for the JVM and the Java App Server tooling that was so much more advanced than anything else at the time. It was basically Docker + K8s for anything running on the JVM more than 2 decades earlier. Java the language eventually drove me away because the productivity was so…

Let me extol the virtues of Java the language. You can take pretty much any code written for Java 1.0 and you can still build and run it on Java 24. There are exceptions (sun.misc.Unsafe usage, for example) but they are few and far between. Moreso than nearly any other language backwards compatibility has been key to java. Heck, there's a pretty good chance you can take a jar compiled for 1.0 and still use it to this…

That's not the virtues of Java the language. That's the virtues of Java the backward-compatible platform. That is, you didn't say anything about the language (syntax and semantics), you only talked about backward compatibility.

(It's still a valid point. It's just not the point you labeled it as.)

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