The R Consortium recently interviewed Jan Vitek, a professor at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He specializes in programming languages, compilers, and systems. Notably, he developed one of the first real-time Java virtual machines in collaboration with Boeing, which involved writing the navigation software of a ScanEagle UAV in Java and demonstrating that it out-performed the legacy version of the system written in C++. Vitek is actively involved in the programmin...