Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

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.

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.