The Future of Computing

During this historic JavaPolis '07 discussion panel, James Gosling, Joshua Bloch, Neal Gafter, Martin Odersky and moderator Carl Quinn discuss the future of (Java) Computing and lots more. 'Why is immutable not part of the Java language' and 'How should the Java platform evolve?' are questions discussed by this very relaxed panel.

James Gosling
James Gosling received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada in 1977. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983. The title of his thesis was "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints". He has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems and window managers. He has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint based drawing editor and a text editor called 'Emacs' for Unix systems. At Sun his early activity was as lead engineer of the NeWS window system. He did the original design of the Java programming language and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. In February 2007, James was named an officer of the Order of Canada.

Joshua Bloch
Joshua Bloch is a Principal Engineer at Google. He was previously a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems and a Senior Systems Designer at Transarc. He led the design and implementation of numerous Java platform features, including the JDK 5.0 language enhancements and the Java Collections Framework. He is the author of the Jolt Award-winning book Effective Java. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia.

Neal Gafter
Neal Gafter is a software engineer and Java evangelist at Google. He was previously a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he designed and implemented the Java language features in releases 1.4 through 5.0. Neal is coauthor of "Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases" (Addison Wesley, 2005). He was a member of the C++ Standards Committee and led the development of C and C++ compilers at Sun Microsystems, Microtec Research, and Texas Instruments. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rochester.

Martin Odersky
Martin Odersky heads the programming research group at EPFL. His research interests cover fundamental as well as applied aspects of programming languages. They include semantics, type systems, programming language design, and compiler construction. The main focus if his work lies in the integration of object-oriented and functional programming. His research thesis is that the two paradigms are just two sides of the same coin and should be unified as much as possible. To prove this he has experimented with a number of language designs, from Pizza to GJ to Functional Nets. He has also influenced the development of Java as a co-designer of Java generics and as the original author of the current javac reference compiler. His current work concentrates on the Scala programming language, which unifies FP and OOP while staying completely interoperable with Java and .NET.

Martin Odersky got his doctorate from ETH Zürich, in 1989. He held research positions at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center from 1989 and at Yale University from 1991. He was then a professor at the Univerisity of Karlsruhe from 1993 and at the University of South Australia from 1997. He joined EPFL as full professor in 1999. He is associate editor of the Journal of Functional Programming and member of IFIP WG 2.8. He was conference chair for ICFP 2000, and program chair for ECOOP 2004 as well as ETAPS/CC 2007.