James Gosling
Often credited as the father of the Java programming language.
Most quoted
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as you can, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
— from Commonly attributed/quoted by him
"The problem with C++ is that it's too easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Java is much harder to shoot yourself in the foot with, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off."
— from Interview/Presentation, 1996
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
— from often attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, but Gosling has used it in context of software development
All quotes by James Gosling (361)
The problem with C++ is that it's too easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Java makes it harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, it blows your whole leg off.
I don't believe in the concept of 'write once, run anywhere.' I believe in 'write once, debug everywhere.'
Most software today is very much like an ICE age. It's frozen. It's static. It's not dynamic. It's not adaptable. It's not resilient.
Software development is a craft, not an engineering discipline.
The future of computing is in the network.
I'm a firm believer in the idea that if you're going to build something, you should build it well.
The biggest mistake you can make is to try to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
The most dangerous phrase in the language is, 'We've always done it this way.'
Innovation is not about doing new things, it's about doing old things in new ways.
The biggest challenge in software development is not writing code, it's understanding the problem.
The only way to learn to program is to program.
The internet is a vast wasteland of information, and most of it is wrong.
The biggest problem with open source is that it's not always open.
The future of computing is in the cloud, but the cloud is just someone else's computer.
The biggest threat to innovation is complacency.
The only way to make a system secure is to make it unusable.
The biggest problem with artificial intelligence is that it's not intelligent.
The only way to build a scalable system is to build a distributed system.
The biggest challenge in software engineering is managing complexity.
The only way to build a reliable system is to build a redundant system.
Contemporaries of James Gosling
Other Computer Sciences born within 50 years of James Gosling (1955).