Gosling Returns To The Java Fold 43
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."
Why is this news? (Score:5, Interesting)
He created a commercial Emacs clone, which didn't particularly ingratiate him to the open source community.
He created a commercial window system called NeWS and tried to kill X11 with it, but that was a commercial failure, never really worked anyway, and was largely based on other people's technology.
Then he built a simplistic language for programming consumer devices, but that project failed miserably as well. Only when they put it out on the Internet for free, claimed that they were going to make it "open", and promised to create a browser based application delivery platform did it take off--not because there was anything technical novel about it, but because people wanted to believe in browser-based programming (sadly, Sun has pretty much failed to deliver on all of that). Most of the hard work to make Java a success was done by the JIT developers and IBM.
These days [sun.com], he seems to be porting over code highlighting and some other features from Emacs to NetBeans.
Sorry, but if this is a "personality story", maybe someone can explain to me why I should be excited about it. At Sun, Guy Steele would be my vote for one of the most competent people they have. But Gosling? Why?
64-bit Array Indices? (Score:3, Interesting)
Will someone PLEASE tell this genius to add 64-bit array indices to the language? What in the world good is this stupid language on a 64-bit platform?
And yes, WE DO NEED 64 BITS. LIKE YESTERDAY.
Our lab is taking 24-bit Doppler readings [8 byte doubles, 16 byte long doubles] on simultaneous channels at staggering sampling frequencies, and we can generate a 4GB file in the blink of an eye.
Not to mention MPEGs of e.g. The Ten Commandments or Gone with the Wind.
Re:Eclipse is a slow-moving truck (Score:4, Interesting)
As for Eclipse, it is pretty speedy as long you your have the ram. 512 is really the minimum on a Win2k + Eclipse box. (200M for Win2k + 100M for eclipse + extra for everything else). From what I've seen Eclipse isn't overly ram hungry for a moderen IDE. It seems to use slightly less memory then IntelliJ Idea, which is Currently at 150M on my box, even though it says it is only using 95M.