Gosling Returns To The Java Fold

MemRaven writes "In an article on CNet News, James Gosling reveals that he's returning to the Java Tools group at Sun. The article touches briefly on the Eclipse situation as well as some vague statements about what he's doing in the future. Since he's been gone from the Java fold for a while, this might spell some definite changes in how Sun treats its stepchild."

eclipse has passed critical mass

[Anonymous Coward]

there's nothing Sun can do about it. Gosling's comments about a developer perspective says it all. This is why eclipse has gained such a great following. I know from first hand, a large percentage of jakarta developers are strickly using eclipse now. If you ask around, the Tomcat developers for the most part use eclipse. Many other jakarta projects use eclipse exclusively.

Go rent a DVD from Blockbuster.

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

If you run into this limit you obviously need to subdevide the workload. Make multiple array's to fill the data with.

Go grab a random DVD from Blockbuster. There's a real good chance you'll immediately encounter files of size greater than 4GB.

As I mentioned above, in the medical imaging field, we generate files greater than 4GB in the blink of an eye.

In this day and age, there is simply no excuse whatsoever for any aspect of an "Enterprise" system to lack true 64-bit support. Yes, 32-bit support is nice for backwards compatibility [thank you, AMD], but it's just insane that we don't have a plethora of 64-bit programming languages.

It's like we're stuck in the dark ages, circa 1994.

Re:Go rent a DVD from Blockbuster.

[bellings]

Address limits depend on the Operating System, the Hardware, and the Compiler all working together. I'm suprised you can't find some combination of the three that does what you need.

But, Medical Imaging and DVD playback are NOT enterprise applications.

Re:Why is this news?

[arethuza]

Well, I have to say, NeWS was a thing of beauty - especially with the HyperNeWS stuff that Arthur Van Hoff did. And Java, like it or not, and I do, was a great tool. If the current explosion of APIs is a bit confusing I really don't think it has much to do with his original vision or, indeed, code. He did good stuff, the man deserves respect.

Re:condemning a good platform for one percieved fl

[Mr. Piddle]

Except that it's a monster, jaw-dropping, astounding flaw.

The Java Language Specification explicity states that using longs as an array index is an error. There might be a good reason for this, as there were 64-bit CPUs around when Java was being developed.

Also, when an array gets to a point of literally being 4,000,000,000 elements long, perhaps the application really could use some re-work. What applications need such large one-dimensional structures, anyway? Now that I think about it, it would be pretty easy to create larger arrays, anyway, in the way UNIX inodes allow indirection to access terabytes of data. The performance penalty of the indirection isn't huge.

I thought "Java" was supposed to be write-once, run any-damned-where you please.

It is. However, when you move forward to 64-bit address spaces--and use them--it makes going back to 32-bit a little difficult.

And you guys think Redmond's marketing department lies out their [collective] ass...


Actually, Sun is pretty straight-forward about Java. Usually, the lies come out of the mouths of the people who want to believe them.

Re:Why is this news?

[ajagci]

Well, I have to say, NeWS was a thing of beauty - especially with the HyperNeWS stuff that Arthur Van Hoff did.

I have to disagree. There were several window systems that put code display-side. NeWS perhaps got the most exposure at the time, but it was, in my experience, the flakiest and hardest to program. No doubt, a lot of that was due to the exceptionally poor choice of PostScript as the displaly-side programming language. Even Apple finally exorcised that demon.

And Java, like it or not, and I do, was a great tool.

Java was (and is) 1970's technology. The original Java design and implementation, a typed stack-oriented byte code, was unoriginal and contained some serious blunders. Credit for Java's success goes to Sun marketing who, whether you like it or not, really did do a spectacular job, the Self team and IBM for bringing the technology up-to-speed, and lots of other contributors for fixing innumerable problems with the original design.

It's good that Java has finally brought garbage collection and runtime safety into the mainstream. But that it was Java, rather than one of dozens of similar languages available at the time, is a pure accident of history.