James Gosling

James Arthur Gosling, OC (born May 19, 1955) is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the father of the Java programming language

Education and career
       In 1977, Gosling received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Calgary. In 1983, he earned a Ph.D in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, supervised by Bob Sproull. While working towards his doctorate, he wrote a version of Emacs called Gosling Emacs (Gosmacs), and before joining Sun Microsystems he built a multi-processor version of Unix while at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as several compilers and mail systems.

       Between 1984 and 2010, Gosling was with Sun Microsystems. He is known as the father of the Java programming language.
       On April 2, 2010, Gosling left Sun Microsystems which had recently been acquired by the Oracle Corporation. Regarding why he left, Gosling cited reductions in pay, status, and decision-making ability, change of role, and ethical challenges. He has since taken a very critical stance towards Oracle in interviews, noting that "During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle, where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle." Later, during the Oracle vs. Google trial over Android, he clarified his position saying "Just because Sun didn't have patent suits in our genetic code doesn't mean we didn't feel wronged. While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan [Schwartz]: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun." On March 28, 2011, James Gosling announced on his blog that he had been hired by Google. Five months later, he announced that he joined a startup called Liquid Robotics. Gosling is listed as an advisor at the Scala company Typesafe Inc. and Strategic Advisor for Eucalyptus.

Contributions
       Gosling is generally credited with having invented the Java programming language in 1994. He created the original design of Java and implemented the language's original compiler and virtual machine. Gosling traces the origins of the approach to his early 1980s graduate-student days, when he created a pseudo-code (p-code) virtual machine for the lab's DEC VAX computer, so that his professor could run programs written in UCSD Pascal. Pascal compiled into p-code to foster precisely this kind of portability. In the work leading to Java at Sun, he saw that architecture-neutral execution for widely distributed programs could be achieved by implementing a similar philosophy: always program for the same virtual machine. For his achievement he was elected to Foreign Associate member of the United States National Academy of Engineering. He has also made major contributions to several other software systems, such as NeWS and Gosling Emacs. He co-wrote the "bundle" program, a utility thoroughly detailed in Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike's book The Unix Programming Environment.

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