Do you think that's a good situation? Do you think that we need a new language? Or do you think that's adequate?
Gosling: That's actually working pretty well right now. There have been a number of programming languages out there which are emerging but they tend to be very focused. So things like Ruby and PHP are really good for generating Web pages. But as soon as you go beyond that, you get into trouble. And with so many enterprise applications, the Web page is sort of the skin on the outside of the real application. And mostly scripting languages don't do the high-performance, large-scale computing very well.
What do you think will be the next big tech innovation that will affect enterprise IT?
Gosling: There's a lot of stuff going on around multithreading--for example, the way that Moore's Law is shifting from clock rate to number of cores, which means people have to be increasingly conscious of what it means to build multithreaded applications.
Do you think Microsoft will be able to maintain its dominance in the enterprise?
Gosling: They're going to be dominant on enterprise desktops for a long time. They really have a stranglehold there. Part of me finds that rather mysterious, given that everyone's complaining about things like security, and you've got to your antivirus up to date. It's like, why are we using a machine that needs antivirus software? I don't understand why anyone would run Outlook, for example.
"I'm not exactly an expert on the state of Vista. But it sure seems boring."
What do you use for development?
Gosling: I go back and forth between Solaris and Mac OS X. Systems that have real security. They have real reliability. They don't break. They pretty much just work.
What about Microsoft's dominance in areas other than desktops?
Gosling: They don't have nearly the stranglehold in the enterprise server arena that they have on the desktop. A lot of their game over the past couple of years has been to try to leverage their desktop monopoly in the server space. They've been moderately effective at doing that.
What's your take on Vista?
Gosling: I tend to stay away from Microsoft (software) because it tends to be so toxic. I'm not exactly an expert on the state of Vista. But it sure seems boring. They've put in a lot of eye candy but other than that it seems like an awful lot of money for not very much.
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