It’s hip2b2

Globe and Mail have this nice interview with the Father of Java, James Gosling. He is described as:

… one of the world’s most famous computer programmers, known as the “father of Java” for his key role in developing the ubiquitous though often-unnoticed programming language. About five million professional programmers use Java every day, writing everything from code for network servers to applications on cellphones.

Here are some interesting tidbits from the interview:

• On how he started, “Then I met a bunch of the people from the ISIS-2 project and they need somebody who could write code and who was cheaper, so they hired me.” Smart and Lucky!
• On going to graduate school, “I applied to a whole lot of grad schools, all over the place, but only got one acceptance and that was Carnegie Mellon.” Wow and he calls himself unlucky.
• On the evolution of Java, “Java is evolving. It’s sort of embedded in the social experiment that is the Internet.” I actually agree with this. I personally think that Java’s popularity is driven by two major things the Internet and the Mobile Phone.
• On the role of Java, “It’s all about making the environment around us more intelligent.” Everything that makes things cheaper, faster and better will always be a welcomed innovation. Making things around us more intelligent helps us do this. However, sometimes, it makes things cruftier.
• On the absurdity of business ideas, “If you had tried to say that ringtones was going to be a multibillion-dollar business, you would have been laughed out of the room.” Oh. It’s so true!
• On Java adoption in the Universities, “… but the adoption in university came afterwards. It came out in ‘95 and people started using it for all kinds of things. For the university world, it has this interesting property.” Hmm… Ateneo adopted Java in 1997. So this was pretty early.
• On the telecoms industry in the US, “They’re moving — but at glacial speeds.”
• On SUN, “Sun is more of a debating society than an organized corporation.”
• And finally, “The technology side is actually really easy. You can predict what’s going to work technologically and what’s not going to work.” Really Now?

Slashdot has some interesting discussion on this. Some of the funnier comments are “No Wonder the Internet is Slower”, “I thought he was talking about PHP” and “My Eyes …. Why is Slashdot Pink?”. On the serious side, there are some discussions on Java’s incompatibility with itself and it’s over-complexity. But, there are moves to solve these issues. So, Go Java Go!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 1st, 2006 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.