Thursday 24 November 2016

James Gosling

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For the former Louisiana sheriff, see James M. Goslin.
James Gosling
James Gosling 2008.jpg
BornJames Gosling
May 19, 1955 (age 61)
Near CalgaryAlbertaCanada
ResidenceSan Francisco Bay AreaCaliforniaU.S.
NationalityCanadian
Institutions
Alma mater
ThesisAlgebraic Constraints (1983)
Doctoral advisorBob Sproull[2]
Known forJava (programming language)
Notable awardsOfficer of the Order of Canada
Website
nighthacks.com
James Arthur GoslingOC (born May 19, 1955) is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the father of the Java programming language.[3][4]

Education and career[edit]

James Gosling received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Calgary [5] and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.[2][6][7] 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[8] while at Carnegie Mellon University. There, he also developed 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.[9][10]
On April 2, 2010, Gosling left Sun Microsystems which had recently been acquired by the Oracle Corporation.[9] Regarding why he left, Gosling cited reductions in pay, status, decision-making ability, change of role, and ethical challenges.[11] 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."[10] 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 [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." [12]
On March 28, 2011, James Gosling announced on his blog that he had been hired by Google.[13] 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.,[14] Independent Director at Jelastic[15] and Strategic Advisor for Eucalyptus.[16]
Gosling is known for his love of proving "the unknown" and has noted that his favorite irrational number is √2. He has a framed picture of the first 1,000 digits of √2 in his office. [17]

Contributions[edit]

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.[18][19][20] He created the original design of Java and implemented the language's original compiler and virtual machine.[21] 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.[22]
For his achievement the National Academy of Engineering in the United States elected him as a Foreign Associate member.[23] 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.

Honors[edit]

Books[edit]

  • Ken Arnold, James Gosling, David Holmes, The Java Programming Language, Fourth Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2005, ISBN 0-321-34980-6
  • James Gosling, Bill JoyGuy L. Steele Jr.Gilad BrachaThe 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, The Java language Environment: A white paperSun 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