James Gosling Interview

Re:James Gosling Interview by Zababa on Thursday August 12, 2021 @06:00AM (#28154263)

That's a nice interview. With the parts about Simula, I really feel like we should have some kind of history of computer science easily accessible, so that we don't do a complete circle every X years. It seems like every "new" feature has already been tested in an old language.

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Re:James Gosling Interview by vlovich123 on Thursday August 12, 2021 @06:17AM (#28154368)

That’s not a helpful way of looking at it I think. Ideas don’t exist in isolation, and thus old experiments have to be carefully analyzed to extract what’s still true out of it. Often times it’s just cheaper to redo the experiment.

This is true across the board for engineering. It’s hard to build something that survives long prolonged contact with engineering realities. Computer architectures change. How things are done efficiently changes. The set of trade-offs we choose to make changes as the underlying business shifts or better business models are discovered. And heck, businesses can be cyclical for no better reason than humans are naturally cyclical in trends (see fashion)

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Re:James Gosling Interview by tragomaskhalos on Thursday August 12, 2021 @07:03AM (#28154720)

Stroustrup was another big Simula fan of course and drew a lot of ideas from it for C++ - it is certainly a very influential language it would seem.

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