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Questions Never Asked

Bill Venners: Lastly, is there anything that people never ask you in interviews that you wish they would ask you?

James Gosling: People never ask me?

Bill Venners: Something that you would enjoy talking about?

James Gosling: In some sense, there are zillions of things that people never ask me. Generally, in interviews, people never ask me really geeky questions. By and large, I'm happy you're talking about really geeky things. This interview has been particularly geeky on the interview scale.

Bill Venners: I'll take that as a compliment.

James Gosling: So it's been a lot more interesting. Nobody ever asks me questions about tree attribution algorithms or what's a good representation for a parse tree -- basically things that nobody's interested in.

Bill Venners: Things the readers of the interviews probably don't really care about.

James Gosling:They don't care. It's not relevant to most people, but it's what I spend my days doing. Those are the kinds of things I find more interesting.

Portions of this interview was first published under the name A Conversation with James Gosling in JavaWorld, a division of Web Publishing, Inc., June 2001.