James A. Gosling, OC (born May 19, 1955 near Calgary, Alberta, Canada) is a software developer, best known as the father of the Java programming language.
In 1977, 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". His thesis advisor was Raj Reddy. 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.
Between 1984 and 2010, Gosling was with Sun Microsystems.
On April 2, 2010, Gosling left Sun Microsystems which had recently been acquired by the Oracle Corporation. Regarding why he left, Gosling wrote on his blog that "Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good." He has since taken a very critical stance towards Oracle in interviews.
On March 28, 2011, James Gosling announced on his blog that he had been hired by Google.
