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 JVM is probably the single most deployed piece of software in the history of the planet.
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But when you have Java, everything looks like a portable, networked application.
The key to making great things is to not worry about making great things, but to worry about making things that are useful.
A lot of the magic in Java is not in the language, it's in the virtual machine.
I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.
The bytecode is the 'wire format' for code.
One man's constant is another man's variable.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
Software is hard. It's harder than anything else I've ever had to do.
The biggest challenge in software is complexity. There's only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer.
If you're not failing occasionally, you're not trying hard enough.
The world is concurrent. Things happen at the same time. The language should reflect that.
I wanted to build a language that would make programmers happy.
The most dangerous thought you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you're doing.
Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure.
In technology, the only constant is change. Get used to it.
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.
The success of Java was largely accidental. We were solving a different problem.
Garbage collection is like housekeeping: nobody notices when you do it, but everyone notices when you don't.
Contemporaries of James Gosling
Other Computer Sciences born within 50 years of James Gosling (1955).