James Gosling, Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, developed what is now known as the Java programming language during his 26-year career at Sun Microsystems with colleagues Mike Sheridan and Patrick Naughton. Java has become the most popular programming language used today in applications as diverse as desktop computing, scientific studies, enterprise applications, web servers, embedded systems, and mobile devices. It is also widely used in computer science education. Gosling left Sun just after Oracle acquired the company in 2010 and worked briefly at Google and then at Liquid Robotics, a company making autonomous ocean-going robots used in oceanographic and atmospheric research.
Gosling received his BS in computer science from the University of Calgary and his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, where he developed a variant on the popular display editor Emacs and wrote a version of the UNIX operating system for multiprocessor computer systems. One of his more significant efforts at CMU was porting UCSD Pascal p-code from a PERQ workstation to run on a DEC VAX computer system by writing a VAX emulator.
Gosling was honored in 2019 as CHM Fellow for the conception, design, and implementation of the Java programming language. see his Fellows bio here.
