undulating humming

[To: Jana Dunfield]
From: Martha Clarke
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2000 09:04:25 -0500
Subject: Re: CMU weekend

You have appointments with Bob Harper, John Reynolds, Frank
Pfenning, Peter Lee, and several grad students.

It was 2000; I was visiting CMU as a prospective grad student. I don't remember all of the conversation with John Reynolds, but I do remember him asking me what I thought about Java. I was rather nervous throughout those meetings, and doubly nervous from meeting someone who (I had gathered) was particularly great and famous, and must have looked it: John said, "I'm sorry—I didn't mean to put you on the spot." I think I stammered something about how I thought the way the Java virtual machine verified bytecode at runtime was interesting.

What's especially memorable is that he seemed genuinely interested in the views of an undergrad he had just met, and that he didn't "lead the witness" by hinting at his opinion. (I'm not sure he ever did say what he thought, quite possibly because he figured that if I cared about his opinion of Java, I'd ask. Or because it was far too soon to tell.)

(I also remember him saying something like, "I'm kind of unusual around here, I mostly work on imperative programming languages.")