Saturday, April 7, 2007

Arthur van Hoff

It's Saturday evening and the kids are relaxed so i figured i'd go online and look around a bit. I immediately ordered Founders at Work as it was something I wanted to write some time ago - so i was even happier when the surname of the author is actually "Livingston" :)

One of the intereresting interviews is with Arthur van Hoff who is now a principal engineer at Tivo, but previously was one of the creators of Java along with James Gosling, Bill Joy, and Guy Steele and he wrote the first Java compiler i believe.

What is neat is that he went to Strathclyde University, the same one i attended (quite a few years after him i should note). I now vaguely remember being told this in a C++ class back in 1997 and having been one of the first people to write a Java application (i downloaded and wrote it the day it was released as i was in a Computational Physics class) i made a mental note.

It's pretty cool to have someone as good a programmer to relate to when you think back to university and they should probably make more of it. Our country is pretty small so we should use all the cred we can get!

See what he's going now.

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