James Gosling

James Gosling has come to India and as part of his trip , we had an "all-hands" with him.
This would probably the second all hands that I have attended in my 3 year career at Sun.
The first one being the first all hands after I joined Sun - after that first one I realised the futility of attending anymore of them - until today :)

After a very mediocre and screwed up intro of James Gosling by our site-director , the fun began when James took the centre stage.
His initial short intro talk about java in particular and computing in general was "nice".
Then the Q&A session began.
What I liked was that , of the many stupid questions raised , his responses went beyond the question and tried to make the session interesting and informative - and it sure was !

I cannot really say that it was an illuminating experience and I am really not enthu and fired up after the all hands but the feeling is more like after "having a satisfying talk with friends and people you respect while sipping tea in a warm afternoon" :)

It was more like an informal non-technical talk (well not much technical other than some stupid domain specific questions raised) : and considering the manager population there - it has to be that ;)
On more serious note - I was not really expecting any tech talk , neither was I expecting his views on how computing and IT is moving forward into future and what he considered was cool to work on , etc.
What I expected was what happened - a very mildy technical talk with a bit of his personal experiences and feelings.
Yours truely as usual was very silent and I was more interested in hearing what he has to say.
But thinking about it, what can you really ask him ? :)
His views are well known , I happen to agree with most of them.
I dont really need clarity or clarification on those , the only question I would have asked him would have been :
"When was the last time you coded on a serious project ?" :P
This is not rhetoric - he suffered from extreme attack of RSI of fingers and wrist for which he had to undergo surgery (If I am not confusing people here that is).

After the talk , the "bimbo" mentality started.
All run towards him crowding around for photo's , autographs , etc.
What was especially worse was that I was "forced" to go through this due to my "team".
Pretty miserable feeling and I have strong reservations against this sort of behaviour.

Bottomline is , it was a very nice one and half hours spent except for the last avoidable 10 mins.
BTW , my architect Rajesh T (well from previous team) very kindly got me an autographed copy of "The Java Programming Language" (co-authored by James Gosling). My heartfelt thanks to him :)