Quotes from James Gosling

The nerves were so badly compressed that I had no feeling on the palm of my hand. I mean, you could have pounded a nail through my hand and I wouldn't have been able to feel it.

The notion of having a fleet of autonomous ocean-going vehicles wandering the world collecting data is something out of fiction.

Anytime someone builds a little application that runs on a cell phone, there's something that goes on the server.

The real payoffs you never understand. You should just give good people money and tell them to do good things.

People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it's an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security.

When you interview at Google, they don't tell you what the job is. You get hired for a pool and the reason they do it that way is they don't want outsiders learning their secrets in the interview process.

When you have large systems, it becomes almost impossible to make even very simple changes.

If you look at our customers, our customers tend to be really high-end people who make big, sophisticated systems.

The data center side of the world is kind of like a solved problem, but you see interesting things happening on the edge with things like cell phones and embedded systems that are becoming really fascinating.

I had half my family that were farmers, and I was really pretty good at repairing farm equipment. There was certainly a period of time where I would have been happy to do that, just to be a farm equipment repairman in Dalemead, Alberta.

I didn't do programming language stuff in college at all.

The NetBeans team tended to be focused on academic purity. Getting them to be a little more blue-collar was a challenge.

So in a strong sense with Java it was a learning process for us - there was some tech learning - but the most important learnings were social or behavioral things.

Renaming a class at one level is really easy; you just change the name. But how do you change all the references to that class and all the imports?

I enjoy evangelizing Java. In my heart of hearts, I'm an engineer, and what makes me happy is building something that works and having someone use it. That's cool.

You see people doing Java-based internal applications all over the place, regular desktop applications that are sort of front-ends to the things in the back, or standalone things.

The way that NetBeans is architected, it's not so much a tool as a tool environment.

Simply put, when you have very large pieces of software, most of the tools look at the individual lines of code as text. It is often extremely powerful to look not at individual pieces of code but at a system as a whole.

Most developer tools try to shield you from actually writing code in constructing the GUI bits or the database bits. Yet when you do write code you usually get glass teletypes where high tech is keyword coloring.

The thing that the Microsoft folks did a really good job of is the easy-to-use tools for making application-building simple.

The asparagus effect is what happens sometimes when you render 2D images into 3D.

My impression is that a really, really high-order concern for the whole development community is interoperability and consistency.

Some of these isolated applications that sit on one machine are a million lines of code. How do you deal with that? Most people have no way to wrap their head around it.

If you want to write the software to control the national medical system of a large country, Java is perfect.