James Gosling
Early life
James Gosling (born May 19, 1955) is a Canadian computer scientist. He grew up near Calgary, Alberta. He earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science from the University of Calgary and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. His doctoral thesis was on the graphical constraints of programming.
Career
Gosling joined Sun Microsystems in 1984. There he led the development of the Java programming language, first released in 1995. He designed Java's original compiler and virtual machine. Before Java, he created Gosling Emacs (1981) and the NeWS window system (1987). He left Sun after its acquisition by Oracle in 2010, then worked at Google, Liquid Robotics, and Amazon Web Services. He retired in 2019.
Contributions
- Creator of the Java language and its core libraries
- Author of the NeWS windowing system
- Developer of the first Emacs implementation in C (Gosling Emacs)
- Co-founder of the independent Java platform
Gosling has received numerous honors, including election to the National Academy of Engineering (2004) and the Order of Canada (2007).