#126 – James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and the Early Days of Computing
Lex Fridman Podcast
Lex Fridman
4.7 • 13.6K Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2020
⏱️ 111 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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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Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
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
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following is a conversation with James Gosling, the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language, |
| 0:05.7 | which in many indices is the most popular programming language in the world, |
| 0:10.5 | or is always at least in the top two or three. |
| 0:13.7 | We only had a limited time for this conversation, but I'm sure we'll talk again several times in this podcast. |
| 0:19.4 | Quicks summary of the sponsors, |
| 0:21.4 | public goods, better help, and express VPN. |
| 0:24.6 | Please check out these sponsors in the description to get this content to support this podcast. |
| 0:29.7 | As a side note, let me say that Java is the language with which I first learned object-oriented |
| 0:35.4 | programming and with it, the art and science of software engineering. Also early on in my undergraduate |
| 0:42.7 | education, I took a course on concurrent programming with Java. Looking back at that time, |
| 0:49.3 | before fell in love with neural networks, the art of parallel computing was both algorithmically |
| 0:55.6 | and philosophically fascinating to me. The concept of a computer in my mind before then was |
| 1:02.0 | something that does one thing at a time. The idea that we could create an abstraction of parallelism, |
| 1:07.7 | where we could do many things at the same time, while still guaranteeing stability and correctness |
| 1:13.2 | was beautiful. While some folks in college took drugs to expand their mind, I took concurrent |
| 1:19.7 | programming. If you enjoyed this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5,000 up a podcast, |
| 1:25.6 | follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. |
| 1:31.1 | As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these |
| 1:35.5 | interesting, but I do give you time stamps, so go ahead and skip, but please do check out the |
| 1:40.4 | sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. |
| 1:46.9 | This show sponsored by public goods, the one-stop shop for affordable, sustainable, healthy, |
| 1:52.7 | household products. I take their official and use their toothbrush, for example. |
... |
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