Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

Java is a great success story. Though, to be fair, James Gosling was the spark but has not been the steward.

Even as early as Java 1.1 and 1.2 he was not particularly involved in making runtime, library, or even language decisions, and later he wasn't the key to generics, etc.

Mark Reinhold has been the hand's-on lead since 1.1, first integrating early JIT's, HotSpot, the 1.2 10X class explosion, and has been running the team all the way through Oracle's purchase, making the JVM suitable for dynamic language like Kotlin and Clojure, open-sourcing, moving to a faster release cadence, pushing JVM method and field handles that form the basis for modern language features, migrating between GC's, and on and on.

As far as I can tell, everything that makes Java great has come down to Mark Reinhold pushing and guiding.

The whole core team is amazing. Gosling wanted a language that was practical from a development POV. Over the years, it's been refined into a language with a fair amount of mechanical sympathy on top of the development experience. Thanks to folks like Mark Reinhold and Brian Goetz.

I have no love for Oracle the big bad company. But I am deeply greatful they've managed to keep that group moving forward.

> Java is a great success story. Though, to be fair, James Gosling was the spark but has not been the steward.

That's like saying Linus was only the spark for git because he spent two weeks hacking it from scratch.

The whole world uses git now.

> dynamic language like Kotlin and Clojure,

Kotlin is not a dynamic language, it's statically typed, just like Java.