SYS-CON.TV Exclusive: Sun's James Gosling on the "Java Career Path"

By Jeremy Geelan	Article Rating:
March 12, 2006 06:45 AM EST	Reads:	26,056

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One of the key differentiators between Pascal and Java, said Sun VP & Fellow James Gosling when interviewed on SYS-CON.TV last week at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, is that computer science students who learn Java at university can go out into the working world and use it to hold down a job. Those who study Pascal, on the other hand, don't have that advantage.

"Unlike Pascal, [Java] has actually got a career path that follows on from what you learn," said Gosling. In other words, you can earn your living from it.

Java is now used "very heavily" by universities as the first programming language that people are taught, he continued, and Sun has been doing a great deal of work with the university sector, in particular with regard to tooling.

"The hi-tech world has pretty much recovered from the dot-com boom..." Gosling noted, and JavaOne is booming because Java is booming:

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"Java fits into everything - that's ended up being the inevitable consequence of the network. There was a time when we build gizmos and they sat by themselves. These days the gizmos are talking to each other. The cellphones are talking to the back-ends, PDAs are talking to everything, desktops are talking to everything ... people are doing on-board electronics for cars and airplanes and all the rest of it."

"And all these things are talking to each other, so having an intellectual underpinning for all of this stuff that spans it is a big piece of what makes it all work."

"Trying to make sure that you can build things so that you really can integrate this universe and that universe and the other universe across technological and national bundaries ... is very entertaining."

View the SYS-CON.TV Exclusive interview in full: James Gosling and Jeremy Geelan in New York City

James Gosling with SYS-CON publisher Jeremy Geelan during a SYS-CON.TV interview at last year's JavaOne.
(Photo copyright SYS-CON Media)

Published March 12, 2006 – Reads 26,056
Copyright © 2006 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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More Stories By Jeremy Geelan

Jeremy Geelan is President & COO of Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of Cloud Expo's "Power Panels" on SYS-CON.TV. You can follow him on twitter: @jg21.

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chthon 03/12/06 07:20:49 AM EST

Pascal was a nice language, but working with strings was horrible.

You had to create all your strings the same length, because another length was interpreted as another type, so you could not pass strings of different length between procedures.

With Borland Turbo-Pascal that was of course possible, but it did only run on CPM/DOS systems.

	Metrics 03/12/06 07:16:45 AM EST
	So Java has overtaken Pascal as the first programming language most often taught at university. Plus Java has also overtaken C++ as the language with most projects on SourceForge. Gosling can rightly be proud of his "child."