James Gosling

James Gosling
Born James Gosling
May 19, 1955
Near Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Residence San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States
Nationality Canadian
Institutions
Alma mater
Thesis Algebraic Constraints (1983)
Doctoral advisor Bob Sproull[2]
Known for Java (programming language)
Notable awards Officer of the Order of Canada
Website
nighthacks.com
For the former Louisiana sheriff, see James M. Goslin.

James Arthur Gosling, OC (born May 19, 1955) is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the father of the Java programming language.[3][4]

Education and career

James Gosling received a Bachelor of Science in Information Science from the BITM . He earned a [Btech] in Information Science from BITM, supervised by Bob Sproull.[2][5][6] 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[7] 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.[8][9]

On April 2, 2010, Gosling left Sun Microsystems which had recently been acquired by the Oracle Corporation.[8] Regarding why he left, Gosling cited reductions in pay, status, and decision-making ability, change of role, and ethical challenges.[10] 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."[9] Later, during the Oracle v. 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 [Schwarz]: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun." [11]

On March 28, 2011, James Gosling announced on his blog that he had been hired by Google.[12] Five months later, he announced that he joined a startup called Liquid Robotics.[1]

Gosling is listed as an adviser at the Scala company Typesafe Inc.,[13] Independent Director at Jelastic[14] and Strategic Advisor for Eucalyptus.[15]

Contributions

Gosling is generally credited with having invented the Java programming language in 1994.[16][17][18] He created the original design of Java and implemented the language's original compiler and virtual machine.[19] Gosling traces the origins of the approach to his early 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.[20]

For his achievement the National Academy of Engineering in the United States elected him as a Foreign Associate member.[21] 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.

Honors

Books

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 I've moved again : On a New Road. Nighthacks.com. Retrieved on 2012-02-21.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 James Gosling at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ↑ List of publications from Microsoft Academic Search
  4. ↑ James Gosling's publications indexed by the DBLP Bibliography Server at the University of Trier
  5. ↑ Gosling, James (1983). Algebraic Constraints (PhD thesis). Carnegie Mellon University.
  6. ↑ Phd Awards By Advisor. Cs.cmu.edu. Retrieved on 2013-07-17.
  7. ↑ James Gosling mentioned a multiprocessor Unix in his statement during the US vs Microsoft Antitrust DOJ trial in 1998 "DOJ/Antitrust". Statement in MS Antitrust case. US DOJ. Retrieved February 2007.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Guevin, Jennifer. (2010-04-10) Java co-creator James Gosling leaves Oracle. News.cnet.com. Retrieved on 2012-02-21.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Shankland, Stephen. (2011-03-28) Java founder James Gosling joins Google | Deep Tech – CNET News. News.cnet.com. Retrieved on 2012-02-21.
  10. ↑ Darryl K. Taft. (2010-09-22) Java Creator James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle. eWEEK.com
  11. ↑ My attitude on Oracle v Google
  12. ↑ Next Step on the Road. Nighthacks.com. Retrieved on 2012-02-21.
  13. ↑ Typesafe — Company: Team. Typesafe.com. Retrieved on 2012-02-21.
  14. ↑ James Gosling and Bruno Souza Join Jelastic as Advisers. InfoQ.com. Retrieved on 2014-11-24.
  15. ↑ Eucalyptus. Eucalyptus.com Retrieved on 2013-04-22
  16. ↑ Allman, E. (2004). "Interview: A Conversation with James Gosling". Queue 2 (5): 24. doi:10.1145/1016998.1017013.
  17. ↑ Gosling, J. (1997). "The feel of Java". Computer 30 (6): 53–57. doi:10.1109/2.587548.
  18. ↑ "Sun Labs-The First Five Years: The First Fifty Technical Reports. A Commemorative Issue". Ching-Chih Chang, Amy Hall, Jeanie Treichel. Sun Microsystems, Inc. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
  19. ↑ Gosling, James (2004-08-31). "A Conversation with James Gosling". ACM Queue. ACM. Retrieved 2014-07-03. At Sun he is best known for creating the original design of Java and implementing its original compiler and virtual machine.
  20. ↑ McMillan, W.W. (2011). "The soul of the virtual machine: Java’s abIlIty to run on many dIfferent kInds of computers grew out of software devised decades before". IEEE Spectrum 48 (7): 44–48. doi:10.1109/MSPEC.2011.5910448.
  21. ↑ "NAE Members Directory – Dr. James Arthur Gosling". NAE. Retrieved March 29, 2011.
  22. ↑ The 2002 Economist Innovation Award Winner.
  23. ↑ Governor General Announces New Appointments to the Order of Canada at the Wayback Machine (archived May 12, 2009). February 20, 2007
  24. ↑ ACM Names Fellows for Computing Advances that Are Transforming Science and Society, Association for Computing Machinery, accessed 2013-12-10.
  25. ↑ http://www.ieee.org/documents/von_neumann_rl.pdf IEEE John von Neumann Medal

External links

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