James Gosling comes to visit
March 11th, 2008 |
Following the discovery that our offices were the birthplace of Java (or least the place where it had its childhood), I invited James Gosling to come visit. For those that don’t know who James Gosling is, he’s more-or-less the father of Java. Java started as a project of James Gosling’s in 1991; today, 17 years later, he’s still at Sun, in charge of guiding the Java platform into the future.
How does one invite such a luminary to come visit one’s offices? One guesses what his email address is and sends him an email out of the blue:
James,
My name is Ari Gordon-Schlosberg, an engineer at Palantir Technologies. I recently became interested in the storied history of our current facilities at 100 Hamilton Ave. in Palo Alto. As Java programmers, our engineering team is really excited to be working in the same place that gave the world Java.
You may not have heard of Palantir, but we’re working on some pretty interesting problems, using Java to build large-scale analysis applications that really push forward the state-of-the-art. We’ve won some accolades for our use of Swing by Romain Guy. If you felt like dropping by the next time you’re in the valley, we’d love to have you come by, see your old digs, and take a peek at what we’re working on.
Sincerely,
Ari Gordon-Schlosberg
To quote the Microsoft Program Manager’s book of proverbs: 90% of making things happen is sending email.
So James dropped by one Thursday for demos, lunch, and schmoozing with our engineers.
The first order of business was to demo our software to James. We got a bunch of the senior engineers together and showed him an abbreviated demo of both Palantir Government and Palantir Finance. We focused less on the problem-space aspects of the software and more on how we’re using Java to build the application. We went over how both of our apps are completely written in Java and that our GUIs are built with custom Swing components.
The most memorable part of the conversation went something like this:
LEAD DEV: So… what do you think of our applications?
GOSLING: It makes me want to weep.
LEAD DEV: Uh… ?
GOSLING: Yeah, we’ve been working on this infrastructure for years to be able to build applications like this and finally someone is doing it.
The rest of the visit was spent talking about Java, its history and its future. Topics ranged from why it’s hard to get dinosaurs like cable companies and mobile carriers to use modern technology to some of the complication in building an optimizing JIT compiler.
After lunch, I walked him to the elevator to see him off. We said our goodbyes and he stepped into the elevator, which was already occupied by the mailman making his rounds. As the doors closed, I hear the mailman say to James:
“Well, I haven’t seen you around here in a while.”
