Education and career

In 1977, James Gosling received a B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary. In 1983, he earned a Ph.D in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and his doctoral thesis was titled "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints". While working towards his doctorate, he wrote a version of emacs (gosmacs), and before joining Sun Microsystems he built a multi-processor version of Unix while at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as several compilers and mail systems.

Since 1984, Gosling has been with Sun Microsystems, and is generally known best as the founder of the Java programming language.

Contributions

He is generally credited as the inventor of the Java programming language in 1991. He did the original design of Java and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. For this achievement he was elected to 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 also cowrote the "bundle" program, a utility thoroughly detailed in Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike's book The Unix Programming Environment.

Honors

In 2007, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. The Order is Canada's highest civilian honour. Officers are the second highest grade.

Trivia

In October 2006 he shaved for the first time in decades (in preparation for sleep apnea surgery). According to him, neither his wife nor his children had ever seen him before without a beard.

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, The Java language Environment: A white paper, 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