Joshua Bloch

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Joshua J. Bloch

Born	August 28, 1961 (age 45) Southampton, New York
Residence	San Jose, CA
Field	Computer science
Academic advisor	Alfred Z. Spector

Joshua J. Bloch, software guru, was born on August 28, 1961, in Southampton, New York, the second of three children of Fritz and Renée (née Spear) Bloch. ^[1] Both parents were Jewish refugees from Nazism: His father was the son of a Swiss schoolmaster, while his mother was the daughter of a Belgian diamond merchant. Both came to the United States in the mid-1930s. Bloch's father, already a college graduate, continued his scientific studies at Columbia University, while his mother, who had arrived in America speaking no English, attended the New York City public schools, followed by Antioch College.

The two met in the late 1950s at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), where Fritz was a chemist and Renée taught nursery school. They married in 1959 and set up housekeeping in Bellport, New York, a sleepy if not comatose village on Long Island's south shore, where Renée still lives. Joshua's older brother, Daniel, now a colleague at Google, was born in 1960; their younger sister, Hannah, who studied social work and married a Massachusetts software magnate, was born in 1962.

Contents 1 Childhood 2 Education 2.1 High school 2.2 College 2.3 Graduate school 3 Professional career 3.1 Transarc 3.2 Sun 3.3 Activities as author 3.4 Google 4 Bibliography 5 References 6 Sources

[edit] Childhood

The Bloch children grew up in an intensely intellectual atmosphere, part of a nerdy BNL subculture embedded in the pervasive mediocrity of central Long Island. The young Joshua was a fan of Mighty Mouse and Speed Racer, but upon growing older, he moved on to more elevated topics. As teen-agers, the Bloch children and their friends held passionate if ill-informed discussions of such topics as whether time was a spatial dimension and whether aleph-one could properly be described as "greater than" aleph-null.

A longtime friend remembers that on his first visit to the Bloch household, when they were kindergarten students, Joshua expressed a desire to go outside and play football. As an adolescent, though, Bloch exhibited a defiant lack of interest in sports, to the dangerous extent of writing "Football Sucks" on posters and walls when his high school finally began fielding a team. Yet today Bloch is a dedicated Steelers fan, and here, as so often happens, his rough edges were rounded off through the love of a good woman--his beloved wife, Cindy, a Pittsburgh-area native. (Thus far Bloch has managed to resist the lesser allure of the Pirates.) While girls were an interest to the teenaged Bloch, he spent much more time trying to prove Fermat's last theorem and the four-color theorem, judging these problems to be more easily soluble.

[edit] Education

[edit] High school

Surprisingly, in light of his later academic achievements, Bloch's scholastic record was unimpressive. In a graduating class of just over 300 at an undistinguished high school, he ranked in the low 100s. (His siblings, on the other hand, were academic superstars. Daniel graduated as salutatorian and was on the U.S. Mathematical Olympiad team as a senior. Hannah was valedictorian.) The explanation is simple: Making an error common among his peer group, Joshua had assumed that everything taught at Bellport High School outside math, science, and typing was nonsense, instead of only 90 percent of it. Thus he made no effort to learn French, to the detriment of his GPA. He completed high school in three years, graduating with his brother in 1978, and was a key member of the school's county-champion math team his last two years (getting kicked off the team his senior year for hoisting a Champagne bottle after his team clinched its division).

Along the way Bloch found time to play Ultimate Frisbee, write humorous articles that were generally unprintable in the school's publications, and co-author a crossword puzzle that was printed in a Simon & Schuster collection edited by Eugene T. Maleska. He was an indifferent chess player but staged epic WFF 'n' Proof duels with his classmate Timothy Peierls, who would himself go on to become a software legend. Bloch passed a series of stiff requirements to join the school's "Computer Squad" and spent many long hours programming and debugging compilers and disassemblers at a level far beyond most of his classmates.

[edit] College

In a pair of decisions that seem ill-advised in retrospect but were reasonable at the time, both Caltech and MIT rejected Bloch. He settled unenthusiastically on Columbia University's engineering school, which at the time of his enrollment did not have a major in computer science (CS students majored in electrical engineering; this was changed during his freshman year). At Columbia, undistracted by dating and rarely indulging in anything more potent than an egg cream from the Mill Luncheonette, Bloch quickly established himself as a star of the nascent computer-science department. Among his favorite professors were Howard Eskin and Joseph Traub.

In an era before the personal computer, when a handful of terminals were enough to serve an entire dormitory, Bloch became known as "the guy with the computer in his room" after assembling a Heathkit terminal and adding a slow-as-molasses modem^[2] with rubber cups into which a telephone receiver could be placed. In addition to his classwork, he did programming for a university astrophysics group and spent one summer at IBM White Plains and another in Oklahoma, working on a remote-sensing project for Conoco, an oil company.

Bloch took no part in Columbia's chronic political convulsions. He did, however, indulge in a symbolic form of rebellion by repeatedly stepping over chains to walk on the tiny patches of grass that dot Columbia's concrete-heavy campus. His reasoning: The signs saying PLEASE KEEP OFF THE GRASS were phrased as a request, not a command, and were meant to reduce pedestrian access but not completely eliminate it.

In other extracurricular activities, Bloch played briefly for Columbia's Ultimate Frisbee club and attended one basketball game, which Columbia lost. In 1980, when his hometown Ultimate team, the Bellport Puffins, set a world record (since broken) for the longest continuous game, Bloch applied his engineering talent by designing and building a Frisbee ringed with tiny electric bulbs for nighttime use (the Puffins' field had no lights). While it drew many compliments for its "cool" appearance while spinning through the air, the batteries it required made Bloch's lighted Frisbee too heavy, and a lighter version based on LEDs was substituted.

[edit] Graduate school

Professor Traub urged Bloch to stay at Columbia for graduate work, but since the department was still experiencing growing pains, he settled instead on Carnegie-Mellon University, at that time perhaps the nation's finest school for computer science. Here Bloch relaxed the intense pace that had characterized his undergraduate studies, taking seven years to complete a thesis ("A practical approach to replication of abstract data objects")^[3] that he admitted could have been done in four. Along the way he sang in the university chorus, took occasional classes in music and other non-technical subjects, and left a trail of slightly broken hearts across western Pennsylvania.

During his thesis defense, in keeping with tradition, the proceedings were thrown open to questions from the audience. At this point Bloch's mother rose and asked a long, highly detailed technical question. He responded with an exasperated "Awww, mom!" and then proceeded to answer the question flawlessly. This was no surprise, as he had given his mother the question in advance.

[edit] Professional career

[edit] Transarc

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1989, Bloch remained in Pittsburgh and took a job at Transarc, a start-up with a strong Carnegie-Mellon flavor. Transarc was a leader in the emerging field of distributed systems, and Bloch made many valuable contributions, eventually rising to the title of senior systems designer. Not the least of his services to the firm came when he recruited his brother, Daniel, to join it. Since graduating from Harvard in 1982, Daniel had been a Paul Erdos-type figure in the software industry, wandering hither and yon and making brilliant contributions wherever he went, without any particular direction or long-term plan.

[edit] Sun

As the 1990s wore on, management changes at Transarc and shifts in the industry as a whole led Bloch to turn his gaze westward. In 1996 he joined Sun Microsystems, where he was a prime mover behind the development of Java (programming language), the most popular general-purpose programming language in the world. His achievements with Java have earned him such accolades as "ninja," "visionary," "rock star," and "Lord of the Collections."

[edit] Activities as author

Bloch became world-famous in 2001 when Addison-Wesley published his classic Effective Java Programming Language Guide, a copy of which could be found in virtually every programmer's cubicle in the days when people used books. In 2005 the same firm published a sequel, Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases, by Bloch and Neal Gafter. Java Puzzlers is said to be even more useful than Effective Java, though this has not been confirmed, as no one could be found who has actually read it. A year later came Java Concurrency in Practice, co-authored with Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, and several other luminaries.

[edit] Google

In 2001 Effective Java won the Jolt Award, named after Jolt Cola, a caffeine-heavy soft drink much beloved by programmers. Three years later Java Developers Journal included Bloch in its list of the Top 40 Software People in the World, second only to Tim Berners-Lee (in alphabetical order).^[4] Bloch's employer joined the chorus of acclaim by promoting him from Senior Staff Engineer to Distinguished Engineer, but it was not enough to keep him at Sun, whose long roster of brilliant minds could not overcome its poor business model. In June 2004 Bloch joined Google, ^[5] where he was named "Chief Java architect" and put in charge of spreading and encouraging the use of that language in the formerly Javaphobic firm.

In this capacity, he travels the globe giving talks to programmers, participating in panel discussions with other software superstars, recruiting callow youths for Google, and being interviewed, also posting the occasional research note as he continues his work to improve Java. Recently he found a very widespread bug affecting Java and other languages that had gone unnoticed for half a century. ^[6] Google, too, has benefited from the Bloch family connection, as Joshua once again persuaded Daniel to join the company.

In his ample free time, Bloch enjoys cooking, gardening (he grows his own garlic), carpentry, and driving. Having outgrown his youthful predilection for punk rock, he is now partial to folksy/rootsy/Celtic music. Other interests include sampling single-malt scotch and drinking beer from small breweries, preferably with non-cutesy names.

[edit] Bibliography

• Joshua Bloch, Neal Gafter (2005). Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases. ISBN 032133678X. 
• Bloch, Joshua (2001). Effective Java Programming Language Guide. ISBN 0201310058. 
• Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes, Doug Lea (2006). Java Concurrency in Practice. ISBN 0321349601. 

[edit] References

1. ^ Much of the personal background in this article is derived from discussions with the subject and his family and friends.
2. ^ Bloch is quoted on the various modems he has used through the years at Wohleber, Curt. The Modem.
3. ^ Bloch, Joshua (May 1990). A Practical Approach to Replication of Abstract Data Objects.
4. ^ Geelan, Jeremy (2004-12-21). The i-Technology Right Stuff. Java Developers Journal.
5. ^ Almaer, Dion (2004-07-07). Joshua Bloch leaves Sun and joins Google.
6. ^ Joshua Bloch (June 2006). Extra, Extra - Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken.

[edit] Sources

• bookpool.com