Q&A: James Gosling, 'father of Java'

The first examples of Java technology were developed for consumer electronics. Are you surprised at how it's taken hold in the enterprise?
The fact it could be used in an enterprise was not a surprise because it was very much designed to handle large-scale server operations. The bit that surprised me was the scale of enterprise adoption.

Can you give an example of something that surprised you?
The big racks in the travel industry at places like Sabre and Orbitz. When you look at a company like FedEx which uses Java heavily - you can't send a parcel through FedEx without a bunch of Java code being involved. It's almost impossible to execute a financial transaction without a piece of Java code being involved.

What's the most interesting use of Java you've seen?
I'm more interested in the science side of things. The current Mars Rovers that are wandering around on Mars, the ground control system has a lot of Java code in it. Or the Keck telescopes, the world's largest telescopes. Their control system has big bags of Java code in it. It doesn't get much cooler than that.

Software development costs continue to be a large portion of IT budgets. Is there any hope for reducing these costs?
No. And my answer 'no' is probably a little bit twisted. I've spent most of my professional career building tools for developers to help reduce costs, to make it so developers can be more effective, more productive and in general stuff like that has been really effective. But then there's this sort of depressing observation that if you look at what IT departments are spending, it doesn't really go down.

What I've observed is this funny phenomenon. If you come up with a good software development tool, that makes life easier for the developers and they can get their job done quicker, then the first thing the manager says is 'oh you've got free time on your hands. Do this extra thing'.

So IT departments are spending the same amount but doing more?
If you look at what IT departments are doing today, some huge fraction of [this] they weren't doing five and 10 years ago. There was no online banking. There were no online stock transactions. There was no online travel. It was all quite different. The set of things people want to do with IT is expanding at the speed that the IT departments can cope with.

So pretty much every IT department will always be running right on the edge of collapse because if you ever get beyond the edge of collapse, you collapse, things fail, things fall apart. If you ever get on the other side, things get a little bit easy and people say 'oh we can do more'.

In some sense I've resigned myself. In the land of tool builders like me, it's not about cutting IT costs as much as it is inevitably about enabling IT departments to do more.

Looking at the development tools used today, what do you think is missing? What is needed?
The focus has shifted from the language to the development environment and the programming interfaces. A language works pretty well as a hub around which everything revolves. Mostly the really interesting advances in enterprise software development over the last few years have been in the tools, in the IDEs [integrated development environments].

Do you think that's a good situation? Do you think that we need a new language? Or do you think that's adequate?
That's actually working pretty well right now. There have been a number of programming languages out there which are emerging but they tend to be very focused. So things like Ruby and PHP are really good for generating web pages. But as soon as you go beyond that, you get into trouble. And with so many enterprise applications, the web page is sort of the skin on the outside of the real application. And mostly scripting languages don't do the high-performance, large-scale computing very well.

What do you think will be the next big tech innovation that will affect enterprise IT?
There's a lot of stuff going on around multi-threading. For example the way that Moore's Law is shifting from clock rate to number of cores, which means people have to be increasingly conscious of what it means to build multi-threaded applications.

Do you think Microsoft will be able to maintain its dominance in the enterprise?
They're going to be dominant on enterprise desktops for a long time. They really have a stranglehold there. Part of me finds that rather mysterious given that everyone's complaining about things like security, and 'you gotta keep your antivirus up-to-date'. It's like, why are we using a machine that needs antivirus software? I don't understand why anyone would run Outlook, for example.

What do you use for development?
I go back and forth between Solaris and Mac OS X. Systems that have real security. They have real reliability. They don't break. They pretty much just work.

What about Microsoft's dominance in areas other than desktops?
They don't have nearly the stranglehold in the enterprise server arena that they have on the desktop. A lot of their game over the past couple of years has been to try to leverage their desktop monopoly in the server space. They've been moderately effective at doing that.

What's your take on Vista?
I tend to stay away from Microsoft [software] because it tends to be so toxic. I'm not exactly an expert on the state of Vista. But it sure seems boring. They've put in a lot of eye candy but other than that it seems like an awful lot of money for not very much.