Eric Allman
Abstract
As a teenager, James Gosling came up with an idea for a little interpreter to solve a problem in a data analysis project he was working on at the time. Through the years, as a grad student and at Sun as creator of Java and the Java Virtual Machine, he has used several variations on that solution. “I came up with one answer once, and I have just been repeating it over and over again for a frightening number of years,” he says.
Index Terms
- A Conversation with James Gosling: James Gosling talks about virtual machines, security, and of course, Java.
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Reviews
Arthur Gittleman
James Gosling is a great Java evangelist, who gives many interviews and conference talks. As the primary creator of Java, and with a purely technical, as opposed to marketing, focus, he is always worth reading or hearing. Eric Allman, himself an early Unix contributor, interviews Gosling, who traces his Java ideas to work he did as a teenager, writing a TECO-like interpreter for users of a satellite data collection project. Gosling goes on to describe the influence of pcode on Java. In the course of the conversation, Gosling touches on Java security, interpretive languages, C# and Microsoft security, Perl, garbage collection, and threading. He concludes with a few general book recommendations, and a comment on Bill Joy's view of what our future holds. The ratio of insight gained to minutes spent reading this article is high. It was especially interesting to see how Java started out conceptually as a hardware emulator. Online Computing Reviews Service
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