IEEE John von Neumann Medal The Economist Innovation Award NAE Foreign Member James Arthur Gosling OC (born 19 May 1955) is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language.

[3] Gosling was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2004 for the conception and development of the architecture for the Java programming language and for contributions to window systems.

While in high school, he wrote some of the software to analyze data from the ISIS 2 satellite, working for the University of Calgary physics department.

He built a multi-processor version of Unix for a 16-way computer system[8] while at Carnegie Mellon University, before joining Sun Microsystems.

[14] Gosling traces the origins of the approach to his early graduate student days, when he created a p-code virtual machine for the lab's DEC VAX computer, so that his professor could run programs written in UCSD Pascal.

[16] He left Sun Microsystems on April 2, 2010, after it was acquired by the Oracle Corporation,[9] citing reductions in pay, status, and decision-making ability, along with change of role and ethical challenges.

We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan [Schwartz]: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun.