James Gosling is one of the world's most famous computer programmers, known as the "father of Java" for his key role in developing the ubiquitous though often-unnoticed programming language. About five million professional programmers use Java every day, writing everything from code for network servers to applications on cellphones.
Mr. Gosling was born near Calgary in 1955 and went to high school and university in the city. He joined Sun in 1984 and is now a vice-president and chief technology officer of the company's developer products group.
This week, he gave an hour-long talk about Java and the computing world as part a conference for developers put on by Sun Microsystems Inc.
Dave Ebner of The Globe and Mail sat down with Mr. Gosling for half an hour after his speech. Casually dressed in a red track jacket, an orange Sun T-shirt and blue jeans, Mr. Gosling talked about the future of Java, the end of oil and "third world" North American phone companies. The conclusion: Unleash the creative weirdoes and good things will happen.
Q: What's a big challenge facing programmers?
A: People in this business tend to fixate on the technology side of things. The technology side is actually really easy. You can predict what's going to work technologically and what's not going to work.
The thing that's hard — and the thing that most people don't want to admit is the hard part — is the social experiment. What is it that people want? Go back a couple years. If you had tried to say that ringtones was going to be a multibillion-dollar business, you would have been laughed out of the room.
Q: You turned 50 last year. What are your goals for the decade ahead?
A: These days I'm doing what I can to steer the Java world in an interesting direction, whatever that turns out to be.
Q: Java's about a decade old. How long does it live? What comes next?
A: Well, I'm sure something will come after it but when and where and what that will look like, I'm not sure. Java is evolving. It's sort of embedded in the social experiment that is the Internet. There's been tremendous adoption of Java for building large-scale enterprise apps. It's worked tremendously well there. There's been all kinds of growth lately in cellphones and more and more embedded systems. It's all about making the environment around us more intelligent. A lot of the evolution we've been pushing is around the tools. That in conjunction with making the whole development process easier. Making sure we can push these things as far as we can.
Q: Was it a surprise that Java caught on so quickly?
A: Oh yeah, it shocked the hell out of me.
Q: What was the spark? The fact that Java was embraced in universities?
A: That certainly helped, but the adoption in university came afterwards. It came out in '95 and people started using it for all kinds of things. For the university world, it has this interesting property. On one hand, it's easy to use and education-friendly as Pascal had been historically. And on the other hand, it's got an upside. You can do adventurous things.
The core of the revolution in the education world was about the fact that it fit all their didactic requirements and it also gave people a career path. There was something they could do with it. With Pascal, if it was the only thing you knew, it wouldn't get you anywhere.
Q: Is it a disappointment at all that Sun didn't see as many money benefits from Java as it might have?
