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WHO IS JAMES GOSLING?
James Gosling was born on May 19, 1955 in Calgary (Alberta), Canada. In 1977, he received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Calgary, and in 1983 obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the same institute with a thesis entitled "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints ".
After graduation, Gosling worked for a short period for IBM, but in 1984 he started working in the newly formed Sun Microsystems, a Silicon Valley software and semiconductor company, where he initially held the position of chief engineer of the NeWS window system project, and then became its vice president and partner.
While working on the Sun Microsystem, Gosling continued to develop "his" Java programming language, which came to light in 1995. He remained at the management of the former company until its acquisition by Oracle Corporation, which took place on January 27, 2010. After the acquisition, already on April 2 of the same year, Gosling resigned and commented this action with a cryptic post on his blog “As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good".
In March 2011, Gosling started working for Google, but also this one was a very short experience: on August 30, 2011, after meeting “some folks outside doing something completely outrageous”, he decided to leave Google. The new gig was at Liquid Robotics, which develops low-power, long-range surface and submersible robots designed primarily to collect environmental data in areas inaccessible to manned craft.
For Liquid Robotics, Gosling worked as Chief Software Architect until 2017, when he began working for Amazon Web Service as a Distinguished Engineer.
HISTORY OF JAVA
During the years in which Gosling was at the Sun Microsystem, he started working on the "Oak project” in June 1991, together with his colleagues Mike Sheridan and Patrick Naughton. Initially, this project was called “Oak” in honor of the oak tree that stood outside the office of Gosling. However, later, the name of the project was changed to Java due to copyright problems, in fact, it was already a trademark by Oak Technologies. The choice of this specific name was due to the large amount of Java coffee (coming from the namesake Indonesian island) that the developers and computer scientists of Sun Microsystems used to drink in the very first phase of the programming language.
In order to allow application developers to use it smoothly, Java basic syntax was kept similar to that of the C and C ++ programming languages, but some critical issues considered possible sources of bug or confusion were removed, such as pointer arithmetic and multiple class inheritance.
Initially, the project had as its ultimate goal the interaction with television, but its language was too advanced for the TV cable of that time. At first, therefore, Sun Microsystems decided that this new product could be intended for the creation of complex applications for small electronic devices, but the unexpected explosion of Internet in 1993 made the company change its mind, and Java began to be used as a tool for programming on Internet.
Gosling is the author of the original Java project, the one who made the original compiler and, in 1994, the one who elaborated the first Java Virtual Machine that allows a computer to execute programs written both in Java and in other languages ??translated into bytecode after a first compilation phase. Java was officially launched on May 23, 1995 at SunWorld, and was the beginning of an endless success.
Shortly thereafter, the Netscape Corporation decided to equip its browser with the Java Virtual Machine, which allowed web pages to become interactive at the client level, with applications that were run directly on the user's computer and no longer on a remote server: a real revolution.
Gosling continued to operate on Java development and actively contribute to build Real-Time Specification for Java.
A document called The Java Language Specification (JLS) describes and defines the programming language; first published in 1996, the document was updated based on changes and additions to the language: the latest "Java SE 11 Edition" version was published at the end of 2018.
Java was created to be a programming language with 5 primary objectives:
- simple, object-oriented and familiar;
- robust and safe;
- independent of the platform;
- contain tools and libraries for networking;ù
- designed to execute code from remote sources safely
WHY JAVA WAS SO REVOLUTIONARY
Java is a generic, class-based, object-oriented programming language designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. Its objective is to allow application developers to write the code just once, compile it and then run it anywhere, the so-called WORA principle, or WRITE ONCE RUN ANYWHERE. This means that compiled Java code can be run on all platforms that support Java, without the need for recompilation.
This almost total independence from the hardware platform on which it runs is one of the most important features of Java and is called portability.
However, portability is a technical difficult goal to achieve and its realization implied some challenge: in fact, although it is really possible to write programs in Java that behave the same way on different hardware platforms, these programs depend on virtual machines, each with its own characteristics and subject to bugs. Consequently, this issue led to the revisiting of the famous WORA slogan, "Write Once Run Anywhere", which was re-proposed as WODA "Write Once, Debug Anywhere".
In 1994, due to a ever wider World Wide Web, Gosling and the other colleagues at SUn Microsystems realized they could build a browser, in which to put together all the “weird things” that they had created until then. “A browser”, says Gosling, “equals something that creates a market for tools, servers, development environments. And Java plays a key role in those tools. In the pre-Java world, you look at the WWW world, and a page is essentially a piece of paper. In the Java world, a browser becomes a framework. Content providers are empowered to describe behavior and data formats and everything." This quote is to say that ... in short, as long as there is no market for an invention, this seems quite useless in the eyes of those who have to invest in it (the oldest story in the world).
In 2006 Sun Microsystems distributes the implementation of the Java compiler and virtual machine under the GPL - General Public License; the free Java environment is called IcedTea and one of the most famous Java compilers created outside of Sun Microsystems is GNU Compiler for Java. The following year, Sun ended the publishing process, making all of its JVM code available under free or open source software distribution conditions, except for a small portion of the code of which it did not hold the copyright.
AWARDS AND CURIOSITIES
Throughout his career, James Gosling has received numerous awards, including: 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.
Gosling is also the owner of a long list of patents, the meaning of which you can discover by yourself, because we would not be able to explain exactly what they are for ..!
In 2011 Gosling was in the Reno Air Races, the American national aviation championship, just 30 meters from the place where the Galloping Ghost crashed in a horrible accident, killing the pilot, 10 spectators and injuring many people.
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