James Gosling
More info
- Born
- Known for
- Created Java
- Nationality
- Canadian
Led the work on Java at Sun — the language meant to run set-top boxes that instead took over enterprise servers.
The project started in 1991 under the name Oak, aimed at embedded systems in consumer electronics. The market wasn't there, but when the web arrived, portable sandboxed code was a perfect fit: Java launched in 1995 with browser applets as the attraction. The applets died; the language became the server-side standard instead.
The core idea was compiling to bytecode run on a virtual machine — "write once, run anywhere" — plus garbage collection and no pointer arithmetic. Gosling left Oracle shortly after its acquisition of Sun in 2010, voicing clear dissatisfaction, and has since worked at Amazon among others.