[E-Lang] E FAQ

[Chris Hibbert]

> I guess I'm provoked
> that they had a golden opportunity to get it right and actually went
> out of their way not to.  

I don't know whether this ("went out of their way") was intended as a
metaphor, but I think it is a bad description of what happened.  To the
best of my knowledge and recollection, Gosling did an amazing job of
designing and building a language, an interpreter (the JVM) and a
verifier that implemented capability security rules without having an
articulation that that was what he was doing.  He unfortunately couldn't
do everything himself, and so he ended up farming out the implementation
of the libraries to others.  Since he hadn't articulated the design
principles, the results was a butchering of the library.  It was a
combination of good and bad luck, but blind luck, nonetheless.

Anyone have a different recollection or reconstruction of the history?

Chris