Episode 42 “From Sumatra to Panama, from Babylon to Valhalla” with John Rose

Posted on December 10, 2025

Java's development embraces the past as well as the future and after contributing to it for over 30 years, John Rose is intimately familiar with the process. In this episode he talks about feature design, the right amount of technical debt (which isn't actually zero), why Rice's theorem demands a mix of static and dynamic checks, how Project Sumatra eventually birthed Panama and Babylon, and more.

In this episode, Nicolai interviews John Rose, Senior Architect of the Java Virtual Machine, who brings over 30 years of experience advancing the Java platform.

Make sure to also check the **Duke's Corner podcast** on [dev.java](https://dev.java/duke/corner/).

Additional resources

John's art collection (http only)
Inside.java : News and views from members of the Java team at Oracle
Dev.java : The Destination for Java Developers
OpenJDK
Oracle Java

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