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Right on, James Gosling's work is amazing, and he and the whole Java ecosystem have my gratitude: I went to the first Java World Tour conference and wrote a lit

Right on, James Gosling's work is amazing, and he and the whole Java ecosystem have my gratitude: I went to the first Java World Tour conference and wrote a little blog article about it that was linked on Sun's home Java page for about a year. I was very lucky, and since I was the first search hit for 'Java consultant' for a very long time that gave my wife and I the freedom to live in a rural area and I could get remote work for a decade. As long as I am expressing gratitude, I would also like to call out the Clojure team for developing a wonderful ecosystem in top of Java and the JVM. It must be wonderful to do work that positively affects the lives of millions of people.

jgneff 1y ago
I am also very grateful to James Gosling. I was working with C++ at Taligent (an Apple, IBM, and HP joint venture) in the fall of 1995 when I first downloaded Java to give it a try. I literally jumped up and down with joy after writing my first "Hello, World" program. It was such a breath of fresh air compared to the Taligent CommonPoint application framework we were building. I took the severance package when Taligent imploded, dropped everything I was doing at the time, and have been working with Java and its related software ever since.
- fidotron 1y ago
  I think it's incredible with hindsight how Java countered many of the mid 90s C++ problems, especially by avoiding multiple inheritance. It remains a shame that it didn't launch with generics though, and I still think operator overloading would have been good. Had it done so I think a lot more people would have stuck around for when the performance improved with HotSpot.
  - astrange 1y ago
    > I think it's incredible with hindsight how Java countered many of the mid 90s C++ problems, especially by avoiding multiple inheritance. This is because Java is based on an older language called Objective-C that doesn't have multiple inheritance :) It's not based on C++, that's just the other OO language from the era people usually think of.
    - fidotron 1y ago
      > This is because Java is based on an older language called Objective-C that doesn't have multiple inheritance :) No it's not, certainly not any more than it's "based" on Smalltalk.
      - astrange 1y ago
        https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html
dragandj 1y ago
Both James Gosling (Java) and Rich Hickey (Clojure) are amazing creators! Each brought a breath of fresh air to programming at their respective times.

jgneff 1y ago

I am also very grateful to James Gosling. I was working with C++ at Taligent (an Apple, IBM, and HP joint venture) in the fall of 1995 when I first downloaded Java to give it a try. I literally jumped up and down with joy after writing my first "Hello, World" program. It was such a breath of fresh air compared to the Taligent CommonPoint application framework we were building. I took the severance package when Taligent imploded, dropped everything I was doing at the time, and have been working with Java and its related software ever since.

fidotron 1y ago
I think it's incredible with hindsight how Java countered many of the mid 90s C++ problems, especially by avoiding multiple inheritance. It remains a shame that it didn't launch with generics though, and I still think operator overloading would have been good. Had it done so I think a lot more people would have stuck around for when the performance improved with HotSpot.
- astrange 1y ago
  > I think it's incredible with hindsight how Java countered many of the mid 90s C++ problems, especially by avoiding multiple inheritance. This is because Java is based on an older language called Objective-C that doesn't have multiple inheritance :) It's not based on C++, that's just the other OO language from the era people usually think of.
  - fidotron 1y ago
    > This is because Java is based on an older language called Objective-C that doesn't have multiple inheritance :) No it's not, certainly not any more than it's "based" on Smalltalk.
    - astrange 1y ago
      https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html

dragandj 1y ago

Both James Gosling (Java) and Rich Hickey (Clojure) are amazing creators! Each brought a breath of fresh air to programming at their respective times.