James Gosling

“When you have large systems, it becomes almost impossible to make even very simple changes.”

“One of the toughest things about life is making choices. I had a hard time saying 'no' to a bunch of other excellent possibilities.”

“Renaming a class at one level is really easy; you just change the name. But how do you change all the references to that class and all the imports?”

“Simply put, when you have very large pieces of software, most of the tools look at the individual lines of code as text. It is often extremely powerful to look not at individual pieces of code but at a system as a whole.”

“One of the things that Java is good at is giving you this homogeneous view of a reality that's usually very heterogeneous.”

“Java the language is almost irrelevant. It's the design of the Java Virtual Machine. And I've seen compilers for ML, compilers for Scheme, compilers for Ada, and they all work. Not many people use them, but it doesn't matter: they all work.”

“I didn't do programming language stuff in college at all.”

“The NetBeans team tended to be focused on academic purity. Getting them to be a little more blue-collar was a challenge.”

“The data center side of the world is kind of like a solved problem, but you see interesting things happening on the edge with things like cell phones and embedded systems that are becoming really fascinating.”

“The whole thought of a career with computers - given that hardly anybody even knew what they were - it wasn't even a concept.”

“Anytime someone builds a little application that runs on a cell phone, there's something that goes on the server.”

“Most developer tools try to shield you from actually writing code in constructing the GUI bits or the database bits. Yet when you do write code you usually get glass teletypes where high tech is keyword coloring.”

“I've made the comment that democracies work slower than dictatorships. That's a true thing.”

“I like to bitch and moan about lawyers, but they often have actually good points.”

“From the point of view of the people who are using the platform, one of the most valuable things about Java is the consistency, the interoperability.”

“For us, the real goal is to make it so that the software ecosystem is as healthy as possible.”

“The way that NetBeans is architected, it's not so much a tool as a tool environment.”

“The nerves were so badly compressed that I had no feeling on the palm of my hand. I mean, you could have pounded a nail through my hand and I wouldn't have been able to feel it.”

“In C there are no data structures: there are pointers and pointer arithmetic. So you have a pointer into a data structure.”

“I've always felt that sort of in the abstract, open-source is the right thing to do for a lot of the kinds of things that we do. There are a variety of issues that make it a very complex discussion as to whether it actually works as a business.”