James Gosling

When you interview at Google, they don't tell you what the job is. You get hired for a pool and the reason they do it that way is they don't want outsiders learning their secrets in the interview process.

So in a strong sense with Java it was a learning process for us - there was some tech learning - but the most important learnings were social or behavioral things.

For us, the real goal is to make it so that the software ecosystem is as healthy as possible.

The whole thought of a career with computers - given that hardly anybody even knew what they were - it wasn't even a concept.

The thing that the Microsoft folks did a really good job of is the easy-to-use tools for making application-building simple.

I enjoy evangelizing Java. In my heart of hearts, I'm an engineer, and what makes me happy is building something that works and having someone use it. That's cool.

You see people doing Java-based internal applications all over the place, regular desktop applications that are sort of front-ends to the things in the back, or standalone things.

The NetBeans team tended to be focused on academic purity. Getting them to be a little more blue-collar was a challenge.

The nerves were so badly compressed that I had no feeling on the palm of my hand. I mean, you could have pounded a nail through my hand and I wouldn't have been able to feel it.

I like to bitch and moan about lawyers, but they often have actually good points.

One of the toughest things about life is making choices. I had a hard time saying 'no' to a bunch of other excellent possibilities.

I've always felt that sort of in the abstract, open-source is the right thing to do for a lot of the kinds of things that we do. There are a variety of issues that make it a very complex discussion as to whether it actually works as a business.