A Conversation with James Gosling: James Gosling talks about virtual machines, security, and of course, Java.

Reviewer: Arthur Gittleman

James Gosling is a great Java evangelist, who gives many interviews and conference talks. As the primary creator of Java, and with a purely technical, as opposed to marketing, focus, he is always worth reading or hearing. Eric Allman, himself an early Unix contributor, interviews Gosling, who traces his Java ideas to work he did as a teenager, writing a TECO-like interpreter for users of a satellite data collection project. Gosling goes on to describe the influence of pcode on Java. In the course of the conversation, Gosling touches on Java security, interpretive languages, C# and Microsoft security, Perl, garbage collection, and threading. He concludes with a few general book recommendations, and a comment on Bill Joy's view of what our future holds. The ratio of insight gained to minutes spent reading this article is high. It was especially interesting to see how Java started out conceptually as a hardware emulator. Online Computing Reviews Service