James Gosling

“If you want to write the software to control the national medical system of a large country, Java is perfect.”

“The thing that the Microsoft folks did a really good job of is the easy-to-use tools for making application-building simple.”

“I had half my family that were farmers, and I was really pretty good at repairing farm equipment. There was certainly a period of time where I would have been happy to do that, just to be a farm equipment repairman in Dalemead, Alberta.”

“The notion of having a fleet of autonomous ocean-going vehicles wandering the world collecting data is something out of fiction.”

“You see people doing Java-based internal applications all over the place, regular desktop applications that are sort of front-ends to the things in the back, or standalone things.”

“If you look at our customers, our customers tend to be really high-end people who make big, sophisticated systems.”

“When you interview at Google, they don't tell you what the job is. You get hired for a pool and the reason they do it that way is they don't want outsiders learning their secrets in the interview process.”

“My impression is that a really, really high-order concern for the whole development community is interoperability and consistency.”

“Some of these isolated applications that sit on one machine are a million lines of code. How do you deal with that? Most people have no way to wrap their head around it.”

“So in a strong sense with Java it was a learning process for us - there was some tech learning - but the most important learnings were social or behavioral things.”

“The asparagus effect is what happens sometimes when you render 2D images into 3D.”

“I enjoy evangelizing Java. In my heart of hearts, I'm an engineer, and what makes me happy is building something that works and having someone use it. That's cool.”