
James Gosling joining Google - vu3rdd
http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/next_step_on_the_road
======
masterponomo
I 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.

~~~
rbanffy
> I suspect that Bjarne would have discarded his own trash properly

Either that, or hold it forever.

~~~
cheez
Either that, or accidentally eat his arm.

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sriramk
One year almost to the day since he quit Sun/Oracle (see
<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
Makes me wonder whether they will bring out a competitor to Java, maybe for
Android.

~~~
statictype
They already have at least one world class language designer in Guido. They
also have the Go language.

Point being that if they wanted a competing language to Java, they probably
already had the talent to get it done. (Or just, you know, use Mono/C#).

~~~
joshes
This is a very solid point. Having an internally developed language like Go
(which is, according to Rob Pike, being used "for real stuff" inside of
Google), the creator of Python (one of the most widely used languages in
recent years) and the creator of Java (one of the most widely used languages
for at least a decade now) under one roof has to be an embarrassment of riches
for any group intending to innovate in the programming language space.

~~~
neilk
Nah, that's too many cooks. They all want different things.

Guido is interested primarily in usability, and Python is notoriously poor in
performance.

Rob Pike writes systems languages.

With Java, Gosling has written a very enterprise-friendly language, that drags
C++ halfway to Lisp.

~~~
crux_
Nit: Halfway to _somewhere_ , but that somewhere ain't Lisp.

I'm under-rested and under-caffeinated, but the only thing I can think of that
I'd call an intentional similarity between the two languages is the fact
they're both garbage collected.

~~~
froydnj
FWIW, none other than Guy Steele has cited Java as dragging C++ programmers
halfway to Lisp: [http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-
html/m...](http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-
html/msg04045.html)

~~~
crux_
I'd agree with him, given that this statement was about _programmers_ and Java
really did open the floodgates for a diversity of programming languages to
become accepted, or at least tolerated.

The Java language itself, however, is not very close to Lisp at all.

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AlexC04
For those (like me) who don't know he's famous because he invented Java.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling>

~~~
praptak
For 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> ),
which is sort of predicting the X -> Wayland move and a good paper on software
design.

~~~
nl
Also, 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>

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ChuckMcM
This 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
I'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-...](http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-wrong)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Tcl 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.

~~~
neild
_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._

That's not entirely true. I don't recall the exact timeline, but there was a
Tcl plugin for Netscape which could be viewed as playing in much the same
space as Java or Flash. A bit of work on media display and animation, and it
might well have taken the space that Flash came to dominate.

Unlike browser Java of the time, the Tcl plugin didn't try to bury itself deep
within the roots of the browser, was fast, and worked. :>

~~~
ChuckMcM
The exact time line is that after Java became the surprise success that it
was, the Tcl team responded with 'well yeah, we could do that too.' In Oct
1996 Jacob Levy announced 1.0 of the Tcl plugin [1]. Oracle has eradicated all
of the www.sunlabs.com content in the internet archive AFAICT so it is not
possible to see when Sun Labs went public with it, but it happened several
months after the Java 1.0 release which came out in Navigator in September of
1995.

As I recall the sentiment was 'So you can run it inside a browser, what is the
big deal with that?' I don't know if Jacob lurks here but he would be the
definitive source.

[1] [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-
talk/1996SepOct/0090...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-
talk/1996SepOct/0090.html)

------
6ren
The question for me has been: how could Gosling not go work for Google?

~~~
loboman
He could have joined his own company, or Microsoft, or Facebook

~~~
tonfa
Are they big users of java?

------
afsina
It 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
But 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)

------
l0nwlf
Ken Thompson, Guido Von Rossum, James Gosling : Good going Google.

~~~
mindcrime
Don't forget Rob Pike. :-)

~~~
s1rech
maybe they have an internal mailing list where the ultimate language flame
wars take place.

~~~
moondowner
or the best discussions on earth for the ultimate language circulate :)

------
jjm
When they say "Hire rockstars!", "Hire the best!", etc...

This is what they mean.

Note: I got _several_ down votes for this... wow...

~~~
TillE
There 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.

------
samlittlewood
The google influx does remind of "The Sublimed" from Iain M. Banks' Culture
novels.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sublimed>

------
zacharypinter
This should add an interesting (though legally irrelevant) twist to the Oracle
lawsuit, since they're litigating with some of Gosling's patents.

~~~
kbutler
There could be legal relevance in expert testimony - "We considered this
aspect obvious", "There was prior art in this aspect", etc.

------
enduser
I expect we'll be seeing Google Emacs join the Apps suite.

~~~
munchhausen
Judging 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/>

------
kgosser
I 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
Googles text-only cached version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/next_step_on_the_road&hl=de&strip=1)

------
spravin
Meanwhile Facebook is out talent-scouting at the White House:
[http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/facebook-may-hire-
rob...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/facebook-may-hire-robert-gibbs-
former-obama-aide/?src=dlbksb)

------
mrb
Google 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.

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bilalhusain
Can we speculate good amount of boost to Mirah?

------
tmachinecharmer
They have already got Guido, now Gosling, Bjarne is the next guy I guess!

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leon_
poor google

~~~
VladRussian
sounds like you worked at Sun :)

Google is like MS 20 years ago - nothing can make it noticeably worse or
better.

------
franze
hope the other guys are not too mean to him.

~~~
VladRussian
are they mean to primadonnas at Google?

