James Gosling

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James Gosling : biography

May 19, 1955 –

James Arthur Gosling

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.http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~alumni/advisor.html#G 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 UnixJames Gosling mentioned a multiprocessor Unix in his statement during the US vs Microsoft Antitrust DOJ trial in 1998 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.Guevin, Jennifer. (2010-04-10) . News.cnet.com. Retrieved on 2012-02-21. Regarding why he left, Gosling cited reductions in pay, status, and decision-making ability, change of role, and ethical challenges.Darryl K. Taft. (2010-09-22) . eWEEK.com 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."Shankland, Stephen. (2011-03-28) . News.cnet.com. Retrieved on 2012-02-21. 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.. Nighthacks.com. Retrieved on 2012-02-21. Five months later, he announced that he joined a startup called Liquid Robotics.. Nighthacks.com. Retrieved on 2012-02-21.

Gosling is listed as an advisor at the Scala company Typesafe Inc.. Typesafe.com. Retrieved on 2012-02-21. and Strategic Advisor for Eucalyptus.. Eucalyptus.com Retrieved on 2013-04-22

Honors

  • 2002: he was awarded The Economist Innovation Award. .
  • 2007: he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.. February 20, 2007 The Order is Canada’s second highest civilian honor. Officers are the second highest grade within the Order.

Books

  • Ken Arnold, James Gosling, David Holmes, The Java Programming Language, Fourth Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2005, ISBN 0-321-34980-6
  • James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy L. Steele Jr., Gilad Bracha, The Java Language Specification, Third Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2005, ISBN 0-321-24678-0
  • Ken Arnold, James Gosling, David Holmes, The Java Programming Language, Third Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2000, ISBN 0-201-70433-1
  • James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy L. Steele Jr., Gilad Bracha, The Java Language Specification, Second Edition, Addison-Wesley, 2000, ISBN 0-201-31008-2
  • Gregory Bollella (Editor), Benjamin Brosgol, James Gosling, Peter Dibble, Steve Furr, David Hardin, Mark Turnbull, The Real-Time Specification for Java, Addison Wesley Longman, 2000, ISBN 0-201-70323-8
  • Ken Arnold, James Gosling, The Java programming language Second Edition, Addison-Wesley, 1997, ISBN 0-201-31006-6
  • Ken Arnold, James Gosling, The Java programming language, Addison-Wesley, 1996, ISBN 0-201-63455-4
  • James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy L. Steele Jr., The Java Language Specification, Addison Wesley Publishing Company, 1996, ISBN 0-201-63451-1
  • James Gosling, Frank Yellin, The Java Team, The Java Application Programming Interface, Volume 2: Window Toolkit and Applets, Addison-Wesley, 1996, ISBN 0-201-63459-7
  • James Gosling, Frank Yellin, The Java Team, The Java Application Programming Interface, Volume 1: Core Packages, Addison-Wesley, 1996, ISBN 0-201-63453-8
  • James Gosling, Henry McGilton, , Sun Microsystems, 1996
  • James Gosling, David S. H. Rosenthal, Michelle J. Arden, The NeWS Book : An Introduction to the Network/Extensible Window System (Sun Technical Reference Library), Springer, 1989, ISBN 0-387-96915-2

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.