Microsoft's C# language may be considered a Java killer, but James
Gosling, Sun vice-president and creator of Java, believes his
language is simply the better choice.
Gosling agrees that Microsoft's tools are very good at doing the
simple applications. "You can do the thing that follows their
paradigm really quickly," he noted, "But as soon as you try to
scale up, you get into trouble."
Gosling said Microsoft tools were geared up to helping people
develop their own code. He said that this was not a function of
Visual Basic, the Microsoft programming language, but the fact that
the tools actually simplified programming.
"It has only been fairly recent that [Visual Basic-like] low-end
targeted tool has existed in the Java world.
The difference with Sun's Java approach boils down to scalability.
Gosling said. "We've historically worked on making the really hard
things possible and not worried so much on the easy things."
But he feels the amount of effort Sun and other software firms have
put into development of Java tools has made it easier for
developers to build the easy stuff, according to Gosling.
He said Java has a strong orientation towards high-end programmers.
Addressing Microsoft's assault on the complexity of his language,
he said that the high-end nature of Java did not necessarily make
it complex. "A big piece of the difficulty in designing it was to
try to make it as simple as possible."
Moreover, Gosling said Java was fast becoming an educational
programming language. "If you go around to universities, high
schools and middle schools, more often than not, they are teaching
Java."
Historically, schools tended to teach Pascal as the language
promoted good programming practices. Gosling said that compared
with Pascal, Java had far more growth potential.
Yet he claimed it still offered new developers the kind of
programming constructs that made Pascal so attractive as a learning
aid. Better still, Gosling said, "There's a huge amount of teaching
material around Java for people who have never done any programming
at all. "
One interesting Java development for Gosling has been Bluejay. This
been developed over the past four or five years by a consortium at
the universities. He said it has an IDE (integrated development
environment) designed specifically for teaching programming, for
taking people who have never written a program before in their life
and running them through courses.