James Gosling
Ph.D

Vice-President and Fellow, Sun Microsystems

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James Gosling is the lead engineer and key architect behind Sun Microsystems' revolutionary Java programming language. As an inventor and thinker, he has powered up the productivity of software developers everywhere.

Although Dr. Gosling's achievements have had worldwide impact, and he has lived in the United States for 22 years, he remains resolutely a Canadian citizen. He was born in Calgary in 1955, attended William Aberhart High School and graduated in 1977 with a B.Sc. in computer science from the University of Calgary.

"I go back to Canada regularly," he says. "All my family is there. I certainly feel culturally Canadian. The Canada I grew up in had a much more laid-back view of the universe."

Gosling is a key figure in the workaholic, aggressive, anxiety-ridden world of Silicon Valley, but he refuses to let his cultural roots be torn up. His personal Web site reflects both his intellectual prowess - with advanced technical papers and comments on industry developments and issues - and his casually iconoclastic attitude toward the world and his place in it.

"Hi, I'm James Gosling, and this is my home page," he greets visitors who log on to www.java.sun.com/people/jag. "I'm a guy that works at JavaSoft, a division of Sun Microsystems, where I do odd jobs like helping out with the system architecture and wandering around the country giving talks like why Java is the greatest thing since sliced bread."

Dr. Gosling says he never set out to change the world, or in fact to achieve much of anything. "I never gave a moment's thought to the word career," he says. "I just liked to play with cool toys."

But throughout his career, Dr. Gosling's "playing" has resulted in advances to computer technologies. At Carnegie-Mellon University in Philadelphia, where he went for his doctorate after graduating from the University of Calgary, he developed a text editor called "Emacs," which became the most widely used Unix text editor.

Over the years he has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems and window managers, as well as text and drawing editors. After completing his doctorate in computer science in 1983, Dr. Gosling worked briefly as a researcher for IBM and then, in September 1984, accepted an invitation to join a small startup company in California - Sun Microsystems. There he pursued his interest in networking techniques and products. In 1990 he became part of a team called the Green project that was developing new networking tools. The rise of the World Wide Web enabled him to conjure up a system where "applets" of applications move through the Internet and provide multimedia capabilities on any computer. Launched in 1995, Java has freed programmers from the confines of proprietary systems. Applications can run on computers across the Internet regardless of the operating system they use.

Studies have shown that the productivity of software developers using Java is two to five times greater than with any other programming language. Dr. Gosling explains its effectiveness this way: "A lot of what's in Java is about how you think about the tasks that you do. The programming tools that had been in common usage forced people to think a lot about small details, and made it very difficult to think about what they were working on. Java makes it a lot easier to step back from the details and look at the big picture."

"It's like when you get in your car, you just turn the key. You don't worry about getting fuel pressure up to the right values or supplying power to the spark plugs or cranking the engine. You just hit a button and it starts."

The influence of Java is still spreading. In the summer of 1999, 22,000 software developers descended on San Francisco to attend an annual Java conference. Dr. Gosling is still enhancing the product, most recently by studying how to use it in developing programs for real-time systems such as industrial robots and the computers imbedded in cars, airplanes and appliances.

Meanwhile, he enjoys being an amateur chef and living in Redwood City, halfway between San Francisco and San Jose, with his wife Judy and daughters Kate, 11, and Kelsey, 20 months. On a visit to Calgary in the summer of 1999, he received an honorary doctor of laws from the University of Calgary.