James Gosling

James Gosling received a BSc in Computer Science
from the University of Calgary, Canada in 1977.
He received a
PhD
in Computer Science from
Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983. The title of
his thesis was “The Algebraic Manipulation of
Constraints”. He has built
satellite data acquisition systems, a
multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers,
mail systems and window managers. He has also
built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint based
drawing editor and a text editor called `Emacs’
for Unix systems.
He spent many years as a VP & Fellow
at Sun Microsystems.
At Sun his early activity was
as lead engineer of the NeWS window system.
He did the original design of the
Java programming
language and implemented its original compiler
and virtual machine. He has been a
contributor to the
Real-Time Specification for Java,
and a researcher at
Sun labs where his primary interest was software
development tools.
He then was the Chief Technology Officer of Sun’s Developer Products
Group and the CTO of Sun’s Client Software Group.
He briefly worked for Oracle after the acquisition of Sun in 2010.
After a brief stint at Google, he became the
chief software architect at Liquid Robotics
where he spent his time writing software for the Waveglider,
an autonomous ocean-going robot.
In May of 2017 he became a Distinguished Engineer at
Amazon Web Services.

Awards: The Economist Innovation Award,
The Flame Award USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award,
Officer of the Order of Canada,
a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery,
the IEEE John von Neumann Medal,
and a long list of patents.