James Gosling Interview

I didn&#x27;t see a visible date displayed, so I dug through the view source to find it, just to see when the page was published:<p>&quot;datePublished&quot;: &quot;2021-08-06T15:45:40+03:00&quot;, &quot;dateModified&quot;: &quot;2021-08-06T15:45:40+03:00&quot;,

He says: &quot;And it&#x27;s really funny because JavaScript is essentially Java with the type declarations removed.&quot; That&#x27;s pretty glib and I think not very informative. For more information you can read Sections 2 and 3 of this <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dx.doi.org&#x2F;10.1145&#x2F;3386327" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dx.doi.org&#x2F;10.1145&#x2F;3386327</a>

&quot;In Python and many others, in general, there&#x27;s only one kind of number, and that&#x27;s the double-precision floating-point.&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s correct for Python!

It was very interesting interview. They write the source code, and a static type checker parses the program, constructs an abstract syntax tree, and checks everything it can. And then possible errors are highlighted right within a text editor.

I was hoping to hear more about his opinion on Kotlin, since it&#x27;s, basically, replaced Java on Android, but there&#x27;s little there outside of saying it runs on the JVM.

can anyone expound on what he means when he says that lisp macros defined syntax but not semantics?<p>---<p><pre><code> &gt; The folks at Rust tried to do a decent job of fitting macros in the language. &gt; Other languages, like all of the Lisp family, managed to fit them in more gracefully, but they had a way of defining syntax where the syntax was almost entirely free of semantics. And in most languages, syntax and semantics kind of go hand in hand.</code></pre>

He couldn&#x27;t resist a little troll of vi users right at the very end!

That&#x27;s a nice interview. With the parts about Simula, I really feel like we should have some kind of history of computer science easily accessible, so that we don&#x27;t do a complete circle every X years. It seems like every &quot;new&quot; feature has already been tested in an old language.

&gt;But if you call it &quot;pattern matching,&quot; and it has less power than a regular expression, it feels misleading or like false advertising. But, as just a feature, I think it&#x27;s great.<p>I always it was haskell that introduced the term...

Such an extensive interview and not a single question on Julia - it&#x27;s a shame. I would love to hear Mr. Gosling&#x27;s opinion on the language.

How can Erlang give you &quot;true parallelism&quot; when it does not share memory between cores without copying it?

wow! thanks for this

Thanks for sharing! Cool read!

Gosling: &quot;And the more reliability you need out of the software, the more statically-typed language helps.&quot;<p>Erlang: &quot;Hold my beer&quot;

&quot;Modern developers use IDEs, like NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, or even Visual Studio Code. &quot;<p>I&#x27;m curious how can Eclipse, one of the greatest java projects, be omitted? Then I saw the name of JetBrains at the end of the article, and realized that I just read another soft advertisement.<p>The last one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27886575" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27886575</a>

I find that one can invert pretty much every opinion that Gosling holds on a technical matter and be better off. It boggles the mind that people listen to him.