Monday, April 03, 2006
Q&A with the father of Java
Mr. Gosling was born near Calgary in 1955 and went to high school and university in the city. He joined Sun in 1984 and is now a vice-president and chief technology officer of the company's developer products group.
This week, he gave an hour-long talk about Java and the computing world as part a conference for developers put on by Sun Microsystems Inc.
Dave Ebner of The Globe and Mail sat down with Mr. Gosling for half an hour after his speech. Casually dressed in a red track jacket, an orange Sun T-shirt and blue jeans, Mr. Gosling talked about the future of Java, the end of oil and "third world" North American phone companies. The conclusion: Unleash the creative weirdoes and good things will happen.
Q: What's a big challenge facing programmers?
A: People in this business tend to fixate on the technology side of things. The technology side is actually really easy. You can predict what's going to work technologically and what's not going to work.
The thing that's hard — and the thing that most people don't want to admit is the hard part — is the social experiment. What is it that people want? Go back a couple years. If you had tried to say that ringtones was going to be a multibillion-dollar business, you would have been laughed out of the room.
Q: You turned 50 last year. What are your goals for the decade ahead?
A: These days I'm doing what I can to steer the Java world in an interesting direction, whatever that turns out to be.
Q: Java's about a decade old. How long does it live? What comes next?
A: Well, I'm sure something will come after it but when and where and what that will look like, I'm not sure. Java is evolving. It's sort of embedded in the social experiment that is the Internet. There's been tremendous adoption of Java for building large-scale enterprise apps. It's worked tremendously well there. There's been all kinds of growth lately in cellphones and more and more embedded systems. It's all about making the environment around us more intelligent. A lot of the evolution we've been pushing is around the tools. That in conjunction with making the whole development process easier. Making sure we can push these things as far as we can.
Q: Was it a surprise that Java caught on so quickly?
A: Oh yeah, it shocked the hell out of me.
Q: What was the spark? The fact that Java was embraced in universities?
A: That certainly helped, but the adoption in university came afterwards. It came out in '95 and people started using it for all kinds of things. For the university world, it has this interesting property. On one hand, it's easy to use and education-friendly as Pascal had been historically. And on the other hand, it's got an upside. You can do adventurous things.
The core of the revolution in the education world was about the fact that it fit all their didactic requirements and it also gave people a career path. There was something they could do with it. With Pascal, if it was the only thing you knew, it wouldn't get you anywhere.
Q: Is it a disappointment at all that Sun didn't see as many money benefits from Java as it might have?
A: We've benefited hugely. If we had attempted to garner 100 per cent of the revenue in the Java world, it would have never have taken off. The world is filed with cool technologies that went nowhere because the owner of the technology strangled it.
Q: Is programming more exciting today than when it was when you were studying for your doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University (in Pittsburgh) in the late 1970s and early 1980s?
A: I don't know about more or less. It's certainly different. When I was starting, computer programming was an unusual thing to do. It had this strangeness about it that was enticing, but the kind of things you could do were pretty limited. These days, the fact that your average high-school student has on their little desktop computer more compute power than the biggest supercomputer that Cray ever built, I think is pretty damned exciting.
Q: You get back to Calgary often?
A: Several times a year, most of my family is here. My mom, my brother, my sister, 10,000 nephews.
Q: How'd you get started in the city?
A: When I was a teenager, I stumbled into this by accident at the University of Calgary, where they had a project that was working on the ISIS-2 satellite. That was an unusual and weird thing. A friend of my dad's took me on a tour of the university. I thought it was really cool. Being a sharp-eyed kid, and they were stupid enough to use combination locks rather than key locks, I learned how to break in to the data centre there and taught myself how to program. Then I met a bunch of the people from the ISIS-2 project and they need somebody who could write code and who was cheaper, so they hired me. That was a lot of fun.
Q: When you first started coding, did it immediately feel right?
A: At some level, the thing that gets it for me is building stuff. I'm as happy with a hammer and nail as I am with a keyboard. For me it's building stuff and the thrill I get when something actually emerges and works. The thing about computers that feeds into that is that building sophisticated stuff is a lot easier in the computer world than dealing with protons and neutrons. It's so much easier to whack together stuff in software.
Q: What's your view on the state of computer education in Canada?
A: I actually don't know enough to say anything really profound. At the time I graduated, when I was doing my undergraduate at the U of C, I was actually mostly doing grad courses. It was going to be really difficult to do a grad degree at the U of C. The only place that was slightly interesting was Waterloo. I applied to a whole lot of grad schools, all over the place, but only got one acceptance and that was Carnegie Mellon.
Q: What do you see for Calgary's future?
A: Calgary's got this incredible boom on, but it can't last. If it doesn't diversify its economy, it's going to be dead in 30 years — or whatever the number is. Nobody's saying the amount of oil and gas is infinite. The only argument is how long it's going to be until it's gone.
Q: In your presentation, you mentioned phone companies in North America, calling them "third world" for the lack of advances in mobile networks compared with elsewhere, like Japan. You even called the United States a "stone age country" when it comes to telecom. Are things improving?
A: They're moving — but at glacial speeds. I have to admit I don't have as much contact with them as I used to have, mostly because my stomach just isn't up for it. It seems to be more a matter of the old guard dying off than any enlightenment happening.
Q: Has North America's extensive fixed-line networks held back the jump to massive mobile development?
A: No. The place it's been most advanced and most interesting is Japan, and Japan has at least as much old-line infrastructure as North America. … They [NTT DoCoMo] came up with this scheme of encouraging third parties to develop lots and lots of services in the hopes that that would drive network usage. They came up with a methodology where you could be a software developer for their network. What it took the join was essentially nothing. So, you get two guys and a dog going off to do a game. The game would get popular and the way that popular culture works it explodes really quickly. People were going from napkin to millionaire in two months. This started this huge feeding frenzy of developers, writing all kinds of software, making it really easy for people to get at. It really hinged on having this mechanism from the phone company that allowed third-parties to do all kinds of stuff, to get great diversity.
I don't know how many times I've been in conversations with people [in North America] where they go, "Well, we think DoCoMo was stupid for giving up all that revenue. We want all of it. We're going to have our developers develop all the games." I actually had somebody from Telus say to me, "You know, we did this analysis and we decided that there are eight apps that people need on their cellphones. So we're having our developers develop those eight apps." And it's like — (Mr. Gosling scrunches his face with incredulity) — the person just so deeply doesn't get it.
First, the kind of apps that phone companies generate tend to be mind-numbingly bad. And you can't actually predict what's going to be successful. In a lot of these things that are truly social experiments, you got to try stuff. You've got to have the creative weirdoes out there. And by and large, creative weirdoes don't work for big phone companies. You've got to figure out a way to tap into the creative weirdoes.
Q: At Sun, are you closely involved in managing the company?
A: Not really. I'm pretty high up in the ranks, I'm a vice-president, but I have the luxury of being able to stay away from stuff. Sun's kind of a funny company when it comes to management. A lot of the oil companies are very hierarchical and Sun, on paper, we have a hierarchy, but as somebody once said, "Sun doesn't have an org chart, it has e-mail." Sun is more of a debating society than an organized corporation.
Q: Any concluding comments?
A: Lots of folks keep saying, "Oh isn't the Internet kind of done and boring now?" It's feeling to me like it's just barely started. … It feels like we've got a good 20, 30 years of good solid growth before this thing starts to look like or feel like it's matured and stable.
source:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060329.gtgoslingmar29/BNStory/Technology/home
