Exclusive - Java's guru spills the beans

Network News and our online partner VNUnet are pleased to have pinned down industry guru James Gosling, father of the Java programming platform, for an exclusive online chat session.

Although Network News chaired the interactive forum, we were able to offer our readers a unique opportunity to pitch their own burning questions to the VP and Sun Fellow.

NN: Can you tell us how you came into programming?

James Gosling: I started programming when I was 13. A friend of my Dad's took me on a tour of a local university and I thought it was really cool, so after that I started sneaking back in. The first machine I learned to program was a PDPA in assembly code.

NN: Would you say assembly language was a baptism of fire?

JG: Baptism by fire doesn't begin to describe how difficult that development process was at the time. I thought of it as being outrageously cool.

d0g1e: Assembly is now widely used for viruses. Did you program any?

JG: I have written hundreds of thousands of lines of assembly code. I view the whole virus thing as a complete waste of time. The whole notion of a virus is something fairly unique to the PC platform. The system where I wrote assembly code, viruses weren't even a concept.

Guest27954: How do you feel performance problems associated with Java will be tackled in the future?

JG: There certainly have been performance issues with Java. We've been working really hard on them. The primary way we've attacked the problem is with advanced virtual machines. The performance has been getting very nice.

NN: But there's still some way to go before it rivals C.

JG: The 1.3 beta release that came out last week, when run on Intel, beats C on some benchmarks, we're slower on others. If you look at the pure execution speed of pieces of Java code, they're very good.

NN: What's your opinion on the various Java RAD tools - Microsoft's J in particular?

JG: J isn't a Java application development platform. The development platforms that I've played with have been quite nice, though.

NN: Do you feel you have sufficient momentum to field proprietary versions of Java?

JG: People issue a lot of press releases about things like HP's corruption of the Java platform, but it's hard to go out there and find one of these HPs. The reality doesn't seem to match. This is a competitive world, and people will always take potshots. We just deal with them as they come.

NN: Can we see Sun releasing Java as open source?

JG: It's unlikely that we will go totally open source in the way some people use that phrase. We're pretty close to it. The main issue for us is that one of the real strengths of Java is that it's a very strong cross-platform. We try to make it as free as possible but still enforce interoperability.

Zombiehead: James, what's your stance on Java in relation to open source?

It's one of the reasons Linux is successful. Do you see this as a future possibility?

JG: We'd like to deal with the problem of Java not working on Linux. It's a somewhat complex problem.

The inter-operability problems with Linux are just horrible. You have to be excruciatingly careful because all the different flavours of Linux are all slightly different.

NN: Can you project a time when problems are resolved?

JG: It's hard to tell when those problems will be resolved. The Linux community has got itself into a bit of a pickle. I think they could have avoided it, but it's now going to take time, and it'll be a painful thing for them. They're going to go from being a bunch of hobbyists having a good time to developing mission-critical applications. The road may be a little bumpy.

Richard_Drake: Isn't it pretty late to retrofit a decent collection class hierarchy in JDK1.2? Do you ever regret Java's typing or lack of higher order functions as you design stuff like collections?

JG: It's late to be doing collection classes. Java had some collection classes early on. The world would be better if we'd come up with collection classes earlier on, but on the priority list they didn't make it till a year ago. The problem with higher order functions is that it was, and to some extent still is, an open topic of research. While I like the idea of that, six or seven years ago it wasn't obvious which solution would make sense. All the solutions had problems - usually performance. The situation is somewhat better today. Some kind of higher order function will probably arise, but it's going to take a while.

SideshowBob: Is there space for a greatest common denominator when the reality is that the vast majority of developers are writing for the Windows platform and want tools that enable them to build the best possible Windows apps?

JG: We would like to ensure you can build the best possible Windows apps in Java, but also we're trying to make sure that when you build that Windows app, it also runs on the Mac or Linux. If you want to optimise totally for one platform, there are things on our to-do list that we need to get to. At least these days the to-do list is pretty small...

NN: How did Java come into being?

JG: Java started out as part of the Green project. While we were building this system, partially in C++, we started to have serious problems. Because I'd written various compilers, I got the job of dealing with the tools problem. I started out by trying to do a C++ compiler to fix the problem, but I ended up needing to use a completely different language. It's important to understand that this was all part of a larger project. It was very much a blue-collar language - for people who were actually building something. A tool to get a job done, rather than an academic project.

NN: What do you do to relax?

JG: I code to relax...

NN: So what do you do at work then?

JG: I do the Mr Java Poster Child thing - interviews, meetings, stuff like that. Hard work.

NN: Only time for one more question, unfortunately. What's your favourite film?

JG: Hmm... I couldn't possibly answer that question. Okay, it's the universally trite answer: Casablanca.