
James Gosling, the ‘Father of Java,’ joins Amazon Web Services - petercooper
https://siliconangle.com/blog/2017/05/23/james-gosling-father-java-joins-amazon-web-services/
======
acdha
Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14396055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14396055)

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foo101
I hope he finds Amazon to be a much better place than he found Oracle to be.
The experiences he shared while leaving Oracle were unpleasant.

"As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: Just about anything I could say
that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good."

"For the privilege of working for Oracle, they wanted me to take a big pay
cut."

"In my job offer, they had me at a fairly significant grade level down."

"Oracle is an extremely micromanaged company. So myself and my peers in the
Java area were not allowed to decide anything. All of our authority to decide
anything evaporated."

"The word came down that Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So
she forced the thing to be cancelled. But they didn't save any money because
the money had been spent - so we ended up giving the tickets to charities. We
were forced to give it up because it wasn't the Oracle Way.' On the other
hand, Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million."

Source: [http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-
gosling-...](http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-why-
i-quit-oracle)

~~~
throwaway170523
I realize people like to hate on Oracle, and some hate justified, but there's
also a reason why Oracle is one of the _extremely_ few tech companies that
have survived the test of time.

Gosling is complaining about about pay and management oversight.

Has anyone wonder if overpay and no oversight is what contributed to Sun's
failure.

Speaking as an insider, I can say with 100% certainty it was.

Sun had this hardware business that was printing money and then the music
stopped.

I wonder if Google might suffer a similar fate like Sun. As soon as ad-revenue
slows down, will they need to grow up and be managed like a real company by
putting restrictions on pay and enforce management oversight.

~~~
jakewins
I don't know that it's fair to say that Oracle has survived the test of time;
their core business has been on a steady decline for years; now they are
playing catch-up in cloud and are talking about second derivative growth like
they were an undergrad startup.

The fact is that they have not grown their top line for five years(1), 70% of
their business is in a dying sector and they have opted to cut R&D spending in
favor of stock buybacks and dividend payouts for years(2).

I don't see how they can change course; their investors keep asking for
dividends while the bulk of their competitors are either privately owned or
public with strong founder/owners; point being Oracles competitors are
controlled by investors that want R&D spending, Oracle is not, and Oracle
sorely needs R&D to build a portfolio that'll keep them from being yet another
leveraged buy-out..

    
    
        (1) https://ycharts.com/companies/ORCL/revenues
        (2) http://marketrealist.com/2016/12/oracles-share-buybacks-dividend-trend-will-run-2017/

------
donretag
I wonder if he had to do whiteboard coding and if the in house recruiter
blindly placed him on a team.

~~~
pavement
They had him invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.

~~~
foo101
Source?

~~~
mathnode
It's a little in-joke
[https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en-g...](https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en-
gb)

Even spoofed on a recent Silicon Valley episode.

------
Pxtl
Now, I'm sure Gosling is a much smarter man than me, and I couldn't be a 10th
the language designer he was, but I'm going to say something terrible:

Java was badly designed, as a language. The things that made it good came far,
far too late in its lifetime. The thing that made it successful was not a good
design, but big corporate backing, a free compiler, a batteries-included
approach to libraries, good marketing, and good platform support.

But the language itself was bad. No custom copy-by-value objects, static
typing without generics or macros to make reusable collections, a GUI library
that was widely considered a bad joke, a null hole big enough to drive a truck
through, checked exceptions, the frustrating inconsistency between .Equals and
==...

So many bad decisions. Many of these were mitigated over time, but it took a
long time to get there. It's hard to say that "designed Java" is really a good
feather in the cap.

~~~
justicezyx
Do not paint a picture with one-sided argument. To say Java is badly designed,
is to say human is an evolution failure. It's not hard to find evidences to
support both, but they hardly make a dent to both being hugely successful
things in their respective fields.

Java is a great and extremely well designed language. All you mentioned are
nothing but natural expansion of the language's use cases.

~~~
bitmapbrother
>To say Java is badly designed, is to say human is an evolution failure

I love lines that say so much with so little. Well said.

Java was the right language at the right time. That's why it was so
successful.

~~~
Pxtl
> Java was the right language at the right time. That's why it was so
> successful.

 _any_ moderately-usable language with a free, cross-platform compiler and a
full batteries-included library for _everything_ and support for every major
platform and a major vendor pushing it and the kind of global marketing PR
(The Official Programming Language of Canada!) would have seen the same
success as Java at the time.

The quality of the language design itself was "passable" at best, but that's
all it needed to be with the forces it had pushing it and the market
conditions at the time.

------
forgottenacc57
Seriously not trolling, but can someone please explain why java would be a
great choice of language for a modern project?

What's the sell, these days for java?

~~~
klodolph
All the libraries you need. Fantastic runtime environment. Easy to hire
programmers and admins who work with it. It's $HOT_NEW_THING which really
needs to be sold.

~~~
soulnothing
Okay I buy this, and say the thing about python. It's more the ecosystem than
the language.

But java has so many great languages on the JVM. That inter op flawlessly with
it. Kotlin is my favorite, and allows both java and kotlin files in the same
project.

The language is palpable. But I feel that there are higher level features,
that can ease development and improve readability. Yes, yes the IDE can
generate boiler plate. But that shouldn't be necessary.

~~~
amyjess
I love Python to death, and it's my favorite language, but packaging and
deploying Python apps have always been the ecosystem's Achilles heel.

It's not hard to send a Java app to a Windows user and expect them to be able
to run it, which is more than I can say for Python.

And Java also has Maven, which is by far the best dependency management system
I've used. It's extensible too... aside from managing dependencies, you can
also have Maven perform code generation (which is wonderful if you're working
with Avro) and other things (such as handling OSGi bundle metadata).

~~~
soulnothing
I'm mostly a python dev. But yes deployment is such a pain.

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xyzzy_plugh
Amazon has been a huge user of Java, and I can't see them moving away from it
in my lifetime.

I wonder what they'll have him do.

------
Twirrim
Bill Vass, also formerly of Liquid Robotics is a VP at AWS, maybe had
something to do with the hiring. He had James come do at least one talk while
I was working at AWS, talking about the things Liquid Robotics are up to. The
prohibitive cost of satellite data is just astonishing. It really emphasised
to me just how much livestreaming of SpaceX rockets landing on a barge is a PR
move.

------
g12mcgov
Maybe he'll help make Java more performant on AWS Lambda and cut down the
initial startup times for the JVM!

------
smithsmith
I hate oracle because in the past you need to register to download jvm. I am
glad android moved to open jdk.

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gefh
Bored of underwater robots I guess?

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forgottenacc57
Maybe AWS will move to Kotlin.

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hossbeast
Great, now we'll never get rid of java

