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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

(thenewstack.io)
183 points chhum | 3 comments | 16 May 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mark_l_watson ◴[16 May 25 14:07 UTC] No.44005715[source]▶
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.

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1. jgneff ◴[16 May 25 14:34 UTC] No.44006001[source]▶
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.

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2. fidotron ◴[16 May 25 14:57 UTC] No.44006283[source]▶
I think it's incredible with hindsight how Java countered many of the mid 90s C++ problems, especially by avoiding multiple inheritance.

It remains a shame that it didn't launch with generics though, and I still think operator overloading would have been good. Had it done so I think a lot more people would have stuck around for when the performance improved with HotSpot.

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3. astrange ◴[17 May 25 00:44 UTC] No.44011127[source]▶
> I think it's incredible with hindsight how Java countered many of the mid 90s C++ problems, especially by avoiding multiple inheritance.

This is because Java is based on an older language called Objective-C that doesn't have multiple inheritance :)

It's not based on C++, that's just the other OO language from the era people usually think of.