I’m not one to complain—much—but I did have to laugh at part of CBC’s The Greatest Canadian Invention tonight. Coming in at number twelve was the Java programming language, invented by Alberta’s James Gosling. So what did all of the on-screen graphics show?
XML.
Most of it was fairly generic XML, although there was a sample that was at least Java-related: an Ant buildfile. And I guess it looks computer-y to have dense blocks of characters with lots of <s and >s thrown in. But really, come on.
That said, Tim Bray, co-editor of and a major contributor to the XML specification, is also Canadian, so at least that part was right.
The website at least has Java! 🙂
Was the XML streaming down the screen, ala The Matrix?
Cuz if it wasn’t, that’s just not computer geeky enough for me!!
Not streaming, just scrolling and occasionally swooping. It was very legible though—I recognized the Ant file when I saw something to the effect of
<javac srcdir="${basedir}/src/java"/>.Ed’s right, the Flash app on the website does have real Java code, e.g.
protected boolean empty(String s).The show was actually pretty well-done, if light on detail. Fifty inventions plus host banter, transitory animations and interviews in (charitably) 90 minutes doesn’t leave a lot of time for in-depth discussion of the effect of the Wonderbra on the status of women in Canada, or a hypothetical investigation of our financial standing today had the Robertson screw not been rejected by the U.S. auto industry. It did convince me to look up Margaret Atwood’s LongPen, though.