聰 - Cong1 - Clever

The thing that really strikes me most here at JavaOne is how 聰明 - Cong1 Ming2 - Clever Bright — Smart many of Sun’s Java people are. Joshua Bloch, Neal Gafter, Gilad Bracha, and several of the people who appeared at “Meet the Hotspot dev team” (I don’t have their names, unfortunately. I think one of them might have been Peter Kessler.) just seemed to be really incredibly amazingly super smart. Scary smart. Alien supercomputer mind smart. They also looked like they were really enjoying themselves presenting their work, defending their work (against criticism from both the audiences and each other!), and fielding all types of questions quickly and smoothly, as if they rehearsed the answers. They turned “stupid” questions into chances to explain things in a new way, or a simpler way, and dove instantly into unbelieveably arcane details when somebody finally asked a “good” question.

For some reason the guys who work on the core Java APIs, like Collections, were the most impressive to me. I go to work, I fire up my editor, and I load com/boring/Stupid.java, some interface that is implemented in like three places, all of which either I, or somebody who sits within three cubes of me controls, and change it. Oooooh, scary. They go to work, they load java/util/Collection.java. Every change has implications in millions? billions? well, LOTS of lines of code, most of which they have never seen, and many of which are probably using the APIs in very… let’s say “creative” ways. But yet they still manage to do things like retrofit the entire Collections API for Generics. While keeping full backwards compatibility! Really really impressive.

Too bad none of them have weblogs! I’d love to hear about this stuff all the time, rather than just once a year. Maybe they’d like a constant stream of feedback and new ideas too. Hey Tim Bray! Get on these guys! Their weblogs would probably be a lot more interesting, at least to me, than certain other new ones by Sun employees.