Interview With the Father of Java

Eh-Wire writes "The Globe & Mail interviews James Gosling after a keynote talk to Sun developers in his home town of Calgary. His thoughts and comments regarding the 'dead end' oil industry, disconnected Telco strategist, and unleashing 'creative weirdoes' makes for an interesting read." From the article: "Java is evolving. It's sort of embedded in the social experiment that is the Internet. There's been tremendous adoption of Java for building large-scale enterprise apps. It's worked tremendously well there. There's been all kinds of growth lately in cellphones and more and more embedded systems. It's all about making the environment around us more intelligent."

...Or not.

[dolphinling]

Funny. Some Mozilla people were just about how Sun completely screwed up and all the different places (LAMP, interaction with webpages, etc.) where java could have been big, but wasn't. [0xdeadbeef.com]

Re:My eyes!!

[Anonymous Coward]

april fools joke its april first in GMT

Re:My eyes!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's already April 1st in Greenwich.

Re:why is java soo dead ?

[d3ik]

why aren't any of the cool and useful websites being created with java on the back-end ? Honestly, I believe the problem here is more with Java developers than Java itself. Java developers are constantly trying to overwrite their code (as in writing more than necessary, not saving over an existing file:). Instead of using the KISS mentality, everything has to have an XML configuration file and object factory. Java devs are typically very black and white, code to the requirements, check off the features on their checklists, etc. On the other hand, Google has said they use Java for a number of applications. It's a great tool in the right hands. why has java been relegated to the enterprise space only ? A number of reasons... PHBs feel more comfortable with a "proven" solution with "corporate backing" versus all that pony tail and birkenstock hippie open source stuff (kidding!). Also, the creative types that typically make the 'innovative' web applications usually shy away from the corporate stigma that Java has. See the above comment. Java developers are typically viewed as corporate shills. why is java almost dead on the desktop ? I'll concede that this is due to Java itself. AWT sucked, Swing is marginally better... SWT seems to be the way to go but since Sun didn't invent it they're not going to back it. what are you smoking Gosling...when you say that java is still evolving ? Do you own a newer cell phone? Does it have cool features like text messaging and possibly web browsing? If so, your phone more than likely runs J2ME.

Shameful exploitation of VIPs at Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

I attended the Sun Developer Day in Calgary this week that Mr. Gosling gave the "keynote" at.

The talk was almost the exact same rambling "Java is everywhere..." speech that he's been giving for years now. The highlight was when his Mac completely locked up during the presentation and he had to do a cold restart! He claimed it's never happend before in 5 years of Mac use... ...Hmmm, I'm sensing a unique opportunity to enrage both the Apple zealots AND the Java zealots in one post! ;)

Anyway, my point is that Sun has a long history of exploiting some of their top talent by forcing them to travel around the world giving these lightweight marketing talks at corporate events. I remember in the late 90's it was the same thing with Bill Joy. They had him doing so many talks in different cities every day that the actual meeting was in a room at the airport! He was literally on the ground for less than 2 hours, then off to the next stop.

They fly these guys around on these whirlwind trips to try to draw people to marketing events they would otherwise not bother with. It's seems like such a waste of talent/time. Maybe Sun would be better off letting Gosling and his ilk work on interesting projects that might actually provide Sun with new revenue sources, or at least give them something new and interesting to talk about when they do have to give speeches.

Even at JavaOne, Gosling's role in Java has been reduced to little more than the "funny looking guy that throws out the T-shirts". It's sad really, I never thought I'd feel sorry for James Gosling, but on Tuesday I did.

Re:Java's so 90's!

[leenks]

Haven't you seen annotations [onjava.com] ?

Re:what I don't get is

[Anonymous Coward]

Collection classes that overlap in functionality? Somebody here doesn't understand interfaces and OO design. That somebody is you.