James Gosling

I've made the comment that democracies work slower than dictatorships. That's a true thing.

My impression is that a really, really high-order concern for the whole development community is interoperability and consistency.

Renaming a class at one level is really easy; you just change the name. But how do you change all the references to that class and all the imports?

The data center side of the world is kind of like a solved problem, but you see interesting things happening on the edge with things like cell phones and embedded systems that are becoming really fascinating.

If you look at our customers, our customers tend to be really high-end people who make big, sophisticated systems.

When you have large systems, it becomes almost impossible to make even very simple changes.

I had half my family that were farmers, and I was really pretty good at repairing farm equipment. There was certainly a period of time where I would have been happy to do that, just to be a farm equipment repairman in Dalemead, Alberta.

If you want to write the software to control the national medical system of a large country, Java is perfect.

Simply put, when you have very large pieces of software, most of the tools look at the individual lines of code as text. It is often extremely powerful to look not at individual pieces of code but at a system as a whole.

Most developer tools try to shield you from actually writing code in constructing the GUI bits or the database bits. Yet when you do write code you usually get glass teletypes where high tech is keyword coloring.

Java the language is almost irrelevant. It's the design of the Java Virtual Machine. And I've seen compilers for ML, compilers for Scheme, compilers for Ada, and they all work. Not many people use them, but it doesn't matter: they all work.

Some of these isolated applications that sit on one machine are a million lines of code. How do you deal with that? Most people have no way to wrap their head around it.