James Arthur Gosling (born May 19, 1955)
James Arthur Gosling (born May 19, 1955)
James Gosling received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Calgary and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. While working towards his doctorate, he wrote a version of Emacs called Gosling Emacs (Gosmacs). Before joining Sun Microsystems he built a multi-processor version of Unix for a 16-way computer system while at Carnegie Mellon University. There, he also developed several compilers and mail systems.
1984 and 2010
Gosling was with Sun Microsystems. He is known as the father of the Java programming language. He got the idea for the Java VM while writing a program to port software from a PERQ by translating Perq Q-Code to VAX assembler and emulating the hardware.
On April 2, 2010
Left Sun Microsystems which had recently been acquired by the Oracle Corporation. Regarding why he left, Gosling cited reductions in pay, status, 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 v Google trial over Android, he clarified his position saying "While I have differences with Oracle, in this case, they are on 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 on Sun." However, he approved of the court's ruling that APIs should not be copyrightable.
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. On May 22nd 2017, he announced on facebook that he will be joining Amazon Web Services.
* Gosling is listed as an adviser at the Scala company Typesafe Inc., Independent Director at Jelastic and Strategic Advisor for Eucalyptus.
Gosling initially became known as the author of Gosling Emacs, and also invented the windowing system NeWS, which lost out to X Window because Sun did not give it an open source license. He 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 graduate-student days, when he created a p-code virtual machine for the lab's DEC VAX computer, so that his professor could run programs written in UCSD Pascal. 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 the National Academy of Engineering in the United States elected him as a Foreign Associate member. Another contribution of Gosling's was co-writing the "bundle" program, a utility thoroughly detailed in Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike's book The Unix Programming Environment.
2002 Was awarded The Economist Innovation Award
2002 Was awarded The Flame Award USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award
2007 Was made an Officer of the Order of Canada
2013 Became a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery
2015 Awarded IEEE John von Neumann Medal