James Gosling is the founder and lead designer of the Java programming language. Please check out our sponsors to get a discount and to support this podcast:
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EPISODE LINKS:
James Twitter: https://twitter.com/errcraft
James Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
4:45 - Irrational numbers
8:04 - Math and programming
10:36 - Coding style
14:41 - First computer
23:54 - Lisp
27:22 - Write an Emacs implementation in C
35:15 - Early days of the Internet
45:57 - Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos
56:13 - Work hard and smart
58:48 - Open source
1:10:25 - Java
1:28:31 - Java virtual machine
1:44:05 - Android
1:47:04 - Advice

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The following is a conversation with James Gosling, the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language, which in many indices is the most popular programming language in the world, or is always at least in the top 2 or 3.

We only had a limited time for this conversation, but I'm sure we'll talk again several times in this podcast.

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As a side note, let me say that Java is the language with which I first learned object-oriented programming, and with it, the art and science of software engineering.

Also, early on in my undergraduate education, I took a course on concurrent programming with Java.

Looking back at that time, before I fell in love with neural networks, the art of parallel computing was both algorithmically and philosophically fascinating to me.

The concept of a computer in my mind before then was something that does 1 thing at a time.

The idea that we could create an abstraction of parallelism where you could do many things at the same time while still guaranteeing stability and correctness was beautiful.

While some folks in college took drugs to expand their mind, I took concurrent programming.

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And now, here's my conversation with James Gosling.

I've read somewhere that the square root of 2 is your favorite irrational number.

Is there anything in mathematics or numbers that you find beautiful?

Oh, well, there's lots of things in math that's really beautiful.

You know, I used to consider myself really good at math, and these days I consider myself really bad at math.

I never really had a thing for the square root of 2, but when I was a teenager, there was this book called The Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, which for some reason I read through and damn near memorized the whole thing.

And I started this weird habit of when I was like filling out checks, you know, or, you know, paying for things with credit cards, I would want to make the receipt add up to an interesting number.

Is there some numbers that stuck with you that just kind of

Fortunately, I've actually mostly forgotten all of them.

Well, yeah, I mean, 42 is pretty magical.

I mean, but is there a square root of 2 story in there somewhere?

Well, it's like the only number that has destroyed a religion.

Well, the Pythagoreans, They believed that all numbers were perfect, and you could represent anything as a rational number.

And in that time period, this proof came out that there was no rational fraction whose value was equal to the square root of 2.

And that means nothing in this world is perfect, not even mathematics.

Well, it means that your definition of perfect was imperfect.

Well, then there's the Gatel and completeness theorems in the 20th century that ruined it once again for everybody.

Yeah, although, although, although Gödel's theorem, you know, the lesson I take from Gödel's theorem is not that, you know, there are things you can't know, which is fundamentally what it says.

But if you allow a three-state logic that is true, false, or maybe, then life's good.

I feel like there's a parallel to modern political discourse in there somewhere.

But Let me ask, so with your kind of early

beauty of mathematics, do you see a parallel between that world and the world of programming?

You know, Programming is all about logical structure, understanding the patterns that come out of computation, understanding sort of, I mean, it's often like, you know, the path through the graph of possibilities to find a short route.

Meaning like find a short program that gets the job done, kind of thing.

But so then on the topic of irrational numbers, do you see programming, you just painted it so cleanly.

little of this trajectory to find like a nice little program, but do you see it as fundamentally messy?

of it as, I mean, you watch somebody who's good at math do math, and often it's fairly messy.

When I was a grad student, 1 of the students, his name was Jim Sachs, was he had this reputation of being sort of a walking, talking, human, theorem-proving machine.

And if you were having a hard problem with something, you could just, like, accost him in the hall and say, Jim, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And he would do this funny thing where he would stand up straight, his eyes would kind of defocus.

He'd go, you know, just like, you know, like something in today's movies, he's just, And then he'd straighten up and say, N log N and walk away.

And you'd go, well, okay, so N log N is the answer.

By which time he's down the hallway somewhere.

Yeah, it's just the oracle, the black box, it just gives you the answer.

Yeah, and then you have to figure out the path from the question to the answer.

I think in 1 of the videos I watched, you mentioned Don Knuth, well, at least recommending his book as something people should read.

But in terms of theoretical computer science, do you see something beautiful that has been inspiring to you, speaking of N log N, in your work on programming languages that's in that whole world of algorithms and complexity and these kinds of more formal mathematical things.

Or did that not really stick with you in your programming life?

It did stick pretty clearly for me because 1 of the things that I care about is being able to sort of look at a piece of code and be able to prove to myself that it works.

And, you know, so For example, I find that I'm at odds with many of the people around me over issues about how you lay out a piece of software.

So software engineers get really cranky about how they format the documents that are the programs, you know, where they put new lines and where they put, you know.

The braces and all the rest of that, right.

And I tend to go for a style that's very dense.

Yeah, well, to maximize the amount that I can see at once, right?

So I like to be able to see a whole function and to understand what it does, rather than have to go scroll, scroll, scroll, and remember, right?

Yeah, that's, and people don't like that.

Yeah, I've had, you know, multiple times when engineering teams have staged what was effectively an intervention.

You know, where they invite me to a meeting and everybody's arrived before me and they all look at me and say, James, about your coding style.

I'm sort of an odd person to be programming I'm sort of an odd person to be programming because I don't think very well verbally.

I'm what most people would call a visual thinker.

So when you think about a program, what do you see?

So when I look at a piece of code on a piece of paper, it very quickly gets transformed into a picture.

And it's almost like a piece of machinery with this connected to that.

I see them more like that than I see the sort of verbal structure or the lexical structure of letters.

So then when you look at the program, that's why you want to see it all in the same place, then you can just map it to something visual.

Yeah, just kind of like it leaps off the page at me.

Yeah, what are the inputs, what are the outputs, what the heck is this thing doing?

What's the first program you've ever written?

I mean, I know the first machine that I learned to program on.

Was a PDP-8 at the University of Calgary.

The clock rate was, it was about a third of a megahertz.

I was like, you didn't even get to the M, okay.

Yeah, Yeah, so, you know, we're like 10,000 times faster these days.

And was this kind of like a super computer, like a serious computer for?

No, the PDP-8i was the first thing that people were calling like a mini computer.

They were sort of inexpensive enough that a university lab could maybe afford to buy 1.

And was there time sharing, all that kind of stuff?

There actually was a time sharing OS for that, but it wasn't used really widely.

The machine that I learned on was 1 that was kind of hidden in the back corner of the computer center.

And it was bought as part of a project to do computer networking.

But they didn't actually use it very much.

It was mostly just kind of sitting there.

And it was kind of sitting there and I noticed it was just kind of sitting there.

And so I started fooling around with it and nobody seemed to mind.

Oh, this is way before monitors were common.

So it was literally a Model 33 teletype with a paper tape reader.

Okay, so the user interface wasn't very good.

It was the first computer ever built with integrated circuits.

But by integrated circuits, I mean that they would have like 10 or 12 transistors on 1 piece of silicon.

Not the 10 or 12 billion that machines have today.

I mean, Did you have kind of inklings of the magic of exponential kind of improvement of Moore's Law of the potential of the future that, was that your fingertips kind of thing?

You know, I had always liked building stuff, but 1 of the problems with building stuff is that you need to have parts.

You need to have pieces of wood or wire or switches or stuff like that.

build arbitrarily complicated things and I didn't need any physical materials.

If you love building things, completely accessible, you don't need anything.

And Anybody from anywhere could just build something really cool.

If you've got access to a computer, you can build all kinds of crazy stuff.

And when you were somebody like me who had like really no money, and I mean, I remember just lusting after being able to buy like a transistor.

When I would do electronics kind of projects, they were mostly made, done by like dumpster diving for trash, and 1 of my big hauls was discarded relay racks from the back of the phone company switching center.

I built a machine that played tic-tac-toe.

Of course, the thing that was really hard was that all the relays required a specific voltage.

But getting a power supply that will would do that voltage was pretty hard.

And since I had a bunch of trashed television sets, I had to sort of cobble together something that was wrong but worked.

So I was actually running these relays at 300 volts.

And none of the electrical connections were like properly sealed off.

I'm surprised you survived that period of your life.

I mean, you know, you're, you know, it's pretty common for teenage geeks to discover, oh, Thermite, that's real easy to make.

But do you remember what program in Calgary that you wrote, anything that stands out?

Well, so, mostly, anything of any size was assembly code.

And actually before I learned assembly code, there was this programming language on the PDP-8 called Focal 5.

And Focal 5 was kind of like a really stripped down Fortran.

And I remember playing, you know, building programs that did things like play Blackjack or Solitaire.

Or for some reason or other, the things that I really liked were ones where they were just like plotting graphs.

So something with like a function or a data, and then you'd plot it.

Yeah, I did a bunches of those things and went, Ooh, pretty pictures.

And so this would like print out, again, no monitors.

So it's using something that's kind of like a typewriter And then using those to plot functions.

So when, I apologize to romanticize things, but when did you first fall in love with programming?

You know, what was the first programming language?

Like as a serious, maybe software engineer, what you thought this is a beautiful thing?

I guess I never really thought of any particular language as being like beautiful, because it was never really about the language for me.

And, you know, even today, you know, people try to get me into arguments about particular forms of syntax for this or that.

It's about what you can do, not how you spell the word.

And so back in those days, I learned PL1 and Fortran and COBOL.

And by the time that people were willing to hire me to do stuff, it was mostly assembly code and PDP8 assembly code and Fortran code and control data assembly code for like the CDC 6400, which was an early, I guess, supercomputer.

Even though that supercomputer has less compute power than my phone by a lot.

And that was mostly, like you said, Fortran world.

That said, you've also showed appreciation for the greatest language ever that I think everyone agrees is Lisp.

Well, Lisp is definitely on my list of the greatest ones that have existed.

Is it at number 1 or, I mean, are you, I mean?

You know, the thing is that it's, I wouldn't put it number 1, no.

Well, I guess the number 1 thing to not love about it is so freaking many parentheses.

On the love thing is, you know, out of those tons of parentheses, you actually get an interesting language structure.

And I've always thought that there was a friendlier version of Lisp hiding out there somewhere.

But I've never really spent much time thinking about it.

But, you know, so like up the food chain for me, from Lisp is Simula, which a very small number of people have ever used.

But a lot of people, I think, had a huge influence, right?

On the programming, but in Simula, I apologize if I'm wrong on this, but is that 1 of the first functional languages?

No, it was the first object-oriented programming language.

It's really where object-oriented and languages sort of came together.

And it was also the language where coroutines first showed up as a part of the language.

So you could have a programming style that was, you could think of it as multi-threaded with a lot of parallelism.

So that was back, so the first Simulus back was Simulus 67.

So it had coroutines which are almost threads.

The thing about coroutines is that they don't have true concurrency, so you can get away without really complex locking.

You can't usably do coroutines on a on the multi-core machine, or if you try to do coroutines on a multi-core machine, you don't actually get to use the multiple cores.

Either that or you, you know, cause you start then having to get into the universe of, you know, semaphores and locks and things like that.

But, you know, in terms of the style of programming, you could write code and think of it as being multithreaded.

The mental model was very much a multithreaded 1 and all kinds of problems you could approach very differently.

To return to the world of Lisp for a brief moment, you at CMU, you wrote a version of Emacs that I think was very impactful on the history of Emacs.

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James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and the Early Days of Computing | Lex Fridman Podcast #126