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."

what I don't get is

[sqar]

why Java is so suboptimal compared to languages like Objective-C and APIs like OpenStep/Cocoa. I mean Java is like some sort of second infusion of Coffee (and we all know that only green tea is better at the second infusion ;-) ): you know what it is supposed to be but it just doesn't taste like the real thing.

Doubly astonishing so since SUN was co-developing OpenStep in team with NeXT, so they should have known how to design a proper API and what language features are needed for this. Now the Java API is bloated to no end and still incomplete: I miss the virtuosity of the small but feature complete OpenStep API (why aren't there methods like componentsJoinedByString [apple.com] and componentsSeparatedByString [apple.com] or the goodie makeObjectsPerformSelector [apple.com] in the counterpart java.util.ArrayList available? Or just simple things like a constructor like this: NSArray(java.lang.Object[]) [apple.com]. Those were only some randomly picked small examples. Not to speak of key value coding or EOF what most of you probably don't know.). I am linking here not to the Objective-C Cocoa docs (here I miss categories [stepwise.com] most, although I must admit that those would be a potential security issue for Java Applets (that's where Java made it's first steps: in the webbrowser)) but to the Webobjects JavaDoc to show that such stuff is possible with Java. Only god (and the SUN) knows why they did not make it so. In lieu thereof we've got a plethora of collection classes which overlap a lot in functionality. That pattern shows everywhere in the "official" Java APIs.

And don't get me started on WO/EOF vs. J2EE ;-)

exuse my poor english, it is not my native tongue.

regards, sqar