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James Gosling joining Google
- jjm 16y agoWhen they say "Hire rockstars!", "Hire the best!", etc... This is what they mean. Note: I got _several_ down votes for this... wow...
- TillE 16y agoThere are probably five or six companies in the world that can actually hire "the best", the household names of the field. For everyone else, such hyperbole is not particularly helpful advice. Also, rock stars rarely produce anything interesting after their brief peak. And you'd want to avoid hiring Ringo.
- 6ren 16y agoThe question for me has been: how could Gosling not go work for Google?
- sriramk 16y agoOne year almost to the day since he quit Sun/Oracle (see http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/time_to_move_on http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/time_to_move_on). That probably means he had a 1-year non-compete built into his employment agreement which he had to wait out (which makes me curious about what he could be working on at Google that could trigger that)
- adamc 16y agoMakes me wonder whether they will bring out a competitor to Java, maybe for Android.
- ori_b 16y agoIf anything, they'll try to continue with Java instead, I'd expect. They're a big user internally.
- jjm 16y agoEven if Java is thrown out there is still NDK, not to mention a host of other language inventors at Google ;-)
- ShabbyDoo 16y agoGosling would provide the credibility necessary if Google wanted to usurp Oracle as the provider of an "official" version of Java and/or the JVM. Big Corps are terrified of Oracle. I worked for a Fortune 100 which was all about using Weblogic vs. open source offerings like JBoss. Then, after the Oracle acquisition, the directive was to "explore competing options". Oracle's history of shakedowns is so well established that Google or someone similar might have a shot. I was surprise that IBM didn't make a better attempt to steal Sun's place. One thing to note is that I don't entirely understand the IP issues surrounding Java.
- pyre 16y agoIBM was a competitor to Sun. An IBM acquisition of Sun definitely would have triggered the government to get involved and explore the anti-trust/monopoly angle.
- zacharypinter 16y agoThis should add an interesting (though legally irrelevant) twist to the Oracle lawsuit, since they're litigating with some of Gosling's patents.
- kbutler 16y agoThere could be legal relevance in expert testimony - "We considered this aspect obvious", "There was prior art in this aspect", etc.
- billmcneale 16y agoNot really, it's already the case with this patent: http://www.google.com/patents?id=mEwEAAAAEBAJ http://www.google.com/patents?id=mEwEAAAAEBAJ which was invented by Frank Yellin, who is currently a Google employee. Everyone seeing Sun as the "good guy in the patent war" needs to remember that the Oracle/Google lawsuit was made possible because Sun has always been one the of companies filing the most software patents.
- afsina 16y agoIt is definitely good news for Google. However, as far I as know Gosling was not working on core technical projects for a long time. Maybe he will work more like a tech evangelist like Tim Bray.
- samlittlewood 16y agoBut don't you want that sort of guy _not_ working on core projects? - then they get intrigued by running some little embedded language on toasters, and WHAM. (But you do involve them in enough core work such they have a feel for the practicalities)
- masterponomo 16y agoI once saw Gosling in an airport terminal waiting for a flight. He was consuming a large hot dog. I considered approaching him but decided to respect his privacy. When he finished his hot dog, he threw the messy wrapper directly onto the carpet. It was not a missed shot at the trash can, it was just blithely dropped on the floor. That's when I realized his work on automatic garbage collection had gone too far. I can't prove this, but I suspect that Bjarne would have discarded his own trash properly.
- trurl 16y agoI suspect that Bjarne would be so overwhelmed with catching his flight that he would accidentally throw out his boarding pass along with the wrapper.
- rbanffy 16y ago> I suspect that Bjarne would have discarded his own trash properly Either that, or hold it forever.
- SeanDav 16y agooops my bad, I didn't realize this was a fictional story. <feels dumb?
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- AlexC04 16y agoFor those (like me) who don't know he's famous because he invented Java. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling
- praptak 16y agoFor those for whom this is not enough (or maybe even negative :-) ), there's NeWS. Regardless of this you should also read his "Window System Design:If I had it to do over again in 2002" ( http://www.hack.org/mc/texts/gosling-wsd.pdf http://www.hack.org/mc/texts/gosling-wsd.pdf ), which is sort of predicting the X -> Wayland move and a good paper on software design.
- nl 16y agoAlso, he wrote the first version of Emacs for Unix (which was later forked by Richard Stallman to become GNU Emacs) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs
- samlittlewood 16y agoThe google influx does remind of "The Sublimed" from Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sublimed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sublimed
- franze 16y agohope the other guys are not too mean to him.
- VladRussian 16y agoare they mean to primadonnas at Google?
- l0nwlf 16y agoKen Thompson, Guido Von Rossum, James Gosling : Good going Google.
- mindcrime 16y agoDon't forget Rob Pike. :-)
- s1rech 16y agomaybe they have an internal mailing list where the ultimate language flame wars take place.
- moondowner 16y agoor the best discussions on earth for the ultimate language circulate :)
- nostrademons 16y agoOnly one?
- adharmad 16y agoRob Pike, Vint Cerf, Peter Norvig
- kgosser 16y agoI think HN broke his site, btw. I can't access or ping it. Will be bookmarking for later to read -- I wish him the best!
- cstuder 16y agoGoogles text-only cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/next_step_on_the_road&hl=de&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
- bilalhusain 16y agoCan we speculate good amount of boost to Mirah?
- enduser 16y agoI expect we'll be seeing Google Emacs join the Apps suite.
- munchhausen 16y agoJudging by Gosling's current code editor preference, I would be surprised if that were to happen. Apparently he uses Netbeans and vi for coding: http://james.gosling.usesthis.com/ http://james.gosling.usesthis.com/
- leon_ 16y agopoor google
- VladRussian 16y agosounds like you worked at Sun :) Google is like MS 20 years ago - nothing can make it noticeably worse or better.
- spravin 16y agoMeanwhile Facebook is out talent-scouting at the White House: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/facebook-may-hire-robert-gibbs-former-obama-aide/?src=dlbksb http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/facebook-may-hire-rob...
- ChuckMcM 16y agoThis should be interesting for both James and Google. In the Chinese sense. More than a few of the original Java team ended up there. I suppose Google has probably 'reached out' (or is that 'reach around' :-) to avh as well. The parts that are really interesting is the confluence of language design. Where is Guy Steele these days? At Sun there was a constant tension between Ousterhout(TCL). Java, and Self (wnj). Even in retrospect I don't know if it was a good tension or a bad tension. It made for some really interesting email threads. I also wonder if they see it as a defensive move vis-a-vis recruiting since working with James would be a compelling reason to leave Google. Given Google's current maturity (I mean they just figured out what managers do :-) and the change that happens in adolescent companies, I suspect it is a good time to join if you have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish. There is the old joke "What would you do if you had a billion dollars and a dozen of the smartest engineers you ever met? Join Google and find out."
- davidw 16y agoI'd be curious to hear about some of the Tcl vs Java stuff. I was very into Tcl for a while and hated to see it go south: http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-wrong http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-...
- ChuckMcM 16y agoTcl was the 'language to beat' amongst the new language products. Self was the 'language like no other' (or a totally new way to express what you wanted to a computer). Java was the 'language that re-used code'. C++ was kind of a joke (remember this was the late 80's, early 90's) since it took a perfectly acceptable language, C, and made writing code harder, more error prone, and less likely to produce correct code (all true at the time). Tcl was a language of rapid expression and Java was a language which was safer, in part, because it enforced a certain level of correctness (type safety, no pointer arithmetic, Etc.). Tcl had a "huge" installed base of developers, Java had zero developers and hoped to have 10 or 20K eventually. Bert Sutherland (the guy running Sun Labs and Ivan's brother) got everyone in a room and said "We're going to have a 'language' day, and each of you gets to present why you think your language should exist." the issue was of course that Sun had only so much budget and we had no business reason for developing any new languages. Surprisingly to some, Tcl 'won' that evaluation. Self was going to continue because Bill could self fund it if he wanted to, and Tcl had the developer base and momentum. The decision was taken to scrap the remains of the Java team (called the Live Oak project at the time) at the end of the Fiscal Year (June 30th, 1995). We were all set to be 're-deployed' which was Sun code for 'find a new job inside of Sun or we'll lay you off.' What happened next was unexpected. James Gosling, with Kim Polese's help, had convinced the lawyers to allow us to release the source code for 'free' (very un-Sun like) so that we could at least point at something we had done on our resumes. The requirement was that we have a trademarkable name for it (which I believe was, in part, to prevent Apple or Microsoft from re-publishing it as their own thing). We dropped Alpha 1.1 (we had secretly released Alpha 1.0 in February) on March 23rd. Kim sent out a press release to some folks. (not sure if she used PR Newswire or not) The Mercury News put it on the front page, they got a quote from Marc Andresson over at Netscape that it was cool. When I went to the WWW conference 2.0 (as in second conference :-) in Darmstadt Germany two weeks later, everyone wanted to talk about it. I manually downloaded and installed it on all the Sparcstation 20's that the sales office had brought to the conference and gave a quick set of talking points to the sales guys. When I got back there was a storm because folks like Ed Zander were demanding to know why they hadn't been briefed before we announced it, Phil Sampire(sp?) was complaining that people kept calling the sales office to get their sales droid to come out and talk about it and they had no marketing material and no prep. May press conference was already queued up as the SparcStation 20 / Firewall-One launch event, the SS20 got the boot and they replaced it with the Java 'launch'. I spent a crazy couple of weeks creating a completely Java home page for Sun (had I known it was a portent of all flash sites to come I might have shot myself right then and there :-) Everyone 'forgot' about how they were going to flush the team and instead everyone came out of the woodwork to claim they had supported it all along, SunSoft, SunLabs, and Sun Interactive (which had the only financial success with it at the time, competing against the Time Warner VOD bids). An entirely new 'planet' was born, called JavaSoft and the rest is history. What Java gave Sun at that point in time was a credible threat against Microsoft. The threat was that the new desktop was the browser, and the way you coded for the browser was Java. Tcl didn't play in that space, and to their credit I don't think the Tcl folks were willing to go there just to ride the buzz. Java's wake grew to eclipse the other language efforts and Sun never looked back.
- throwaway40m 16y agopretty shitty of google to just poach all of Sun Microsystem's talent; borrow Java for google vm; and let the rest go to the grubby hands of larry o. congratulations on the new gig, James! Really love what you guys did with that JVM. Great Tech.
- tmachinecharmer 16y agoThey have already got Guido, now Gosling, Bjarne is the next guy I guess!
- mrb 16y agoGoogle picks its employees the same way good VCs pick founders: candidates are selected based on what they are capable of, without focusing too much on the idea they are going to work on in the immediate future.