In a very cool set of circumstances I had the chance to hang out with James Gosling this afternoon at a Canberra Q&A session. There were only six of us there, and we had an hour with an open agenda: ask whatever you like! So I did…
JAG is one very loveable character. The hardcore software engineer who made it big, changed the world, and still remains a nice guy.
I asked him a bunch of questions around Dynamic Languages, the Closure proposal, the status of Swing, his feeling about the growth of OSX (and why doesn’t he use a macbook any more :-), and how he felt around the perceived growing complexity of the platform. It was awesome. Boy he gave some candid answers - he certainly has some strong feelings in the language design space (which I guess can be expected!).
One thing question that was asked (weirdly enough, not by me), was about with the recent hires around JRuby & Jython, is Sun sidelining Groovy? James had some nice things to say about Groovy, actually, and reiterated that really it’s a numbers game for Sun. Big numbers of Ruby and Python developers to lure to the platform, fewer (but growing) numbers of Groovy developers already productive there.
This finally made sense to me. If you’re a Sun bean counter, you’re not looking at Groovy’s beautiful platform interoperability, pragmatic syntax, or easy transition for Java developers. You’re just looking at trying to drag numbers to the platform. So there’s plenty of Groovy love at Sun, and don’t look too hard into those recent hires around other languages.
Huge thank you to Danny from Sun for the invite. I had an incredible time!