Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

Java beta & 1.0 were released my Freshman year of college and I've been writing Java ever since. With the exception of one job where we tried to write a Java-style Enterprise security cloud application in Python every commercial product I've worked on has been built in primarily Java, often times with other languages on the edges of the application.

The key thing I think with Java is the programming model & structure scale well with team size and with codebase size, perhaps even in a way that tolerates junior developers, outsourced sub-teams, and even lower quality developers. All of those things end up becoming part of your reality on big Enterprise products, so if the language is somehow adding some tolerance for it that is a good thing.

The other things around Syntax and such that people complain about? Those are often minor considerations once the team size and code base size get large enough. Across my career there has always been the lone guy complaining that if we did everything in a LISP derived language everything would be perfect. But that guy has almost always been the guy who worked on a small tool off by himself, not on the main product.

Java has changed a tremendous amount as well. A modern Java system has very little in common with something written before Generics and before all the Functional code has been added. Where I work now we have heavily exploited the Functional java add-ons for years, it has been fantastic.