Just two months after his 69th birthday, James Gosling, the father of Java, announced his retirement on LinkedIn. "I'm finally retired," he said. After so many years as a software engineer, it's time for me to have fun. Despite the impact of COVID-19 and the industrial environment, the last 7 years in Amazon have been wonderful. ”
However, from his words, we can't help but think of Guido van Rossum, the father of Python, in October 2019, who vowed to retire, only to join the Microsoft team only a year later that retirement was too boring. Now Gosling also left a sentence at the end of his retirement declaration, "I have a long list of side hustles to do, it will be interesting", and whether he can really achieve "retirement success" also leaves everyone in suspense.
Source: Wikipedia
During his studies, he developed an editor and window system
After all, Gosling never seemed to be idle.
Born on May 19, 1955 in Gosling, Canada, he has been fond of technology since he was a child, and he loves to tinker with electronics.
By the age of 12, Gosling was already designing video game consoles and helping his neighbors repair harvesters.
At the age of 14, Gosling was first introduced to coding and became interested in programming when he was organized by secondary school and organized a visit to a nearby university.
It is reported that a year later, the University of Calgary, which he visited, recruited him as a temporary programmer (part-time), and he also successfully wrote some software for terrestrial analysis of ISIS II satellite telemetry. With a two-way track of achievement, Gosling also attended the University of Calgary and earned a bachelor's degree in computer science in 1977.
In 1983, Gosling received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University with a dissertation titled "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints." During his Ph.D., Gosling also developed a Gosling Emacs editor, the first Emacs-like editor to run on Unix, written in C and using Mocklisp as an extension language, a language with a Lisp-like syntax.
In addition to this, during his time at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), one of his key jobs was to port UCSD Pascal p-code from PERQ workstations to DEC VAX computer systems, for which he wrote a VAX simulator. Later in his work on the Sun Java project, Gosling used this early work as inspiration to come up with the concept of a Java virtual machine, which allows code to be written once and run on multiple platforms, allowing programmers to always write code against the same virtual machine. Of course, that's what happened later.
Back then, after graduating, Gosling joined IBM, where he designed and implemented the Andrew Window System, the first distributed window system, and the Andrew User Interface Toolkit, the first document-based object-oriented toolkit. Since then, he has also consulted on IBM's PC/RT products.
However, it is reported that the work done by Gosling at this stage has not been taken seriously by the company's leadership, and Gosling also wrote with some regret on his LinkedIn about this experience, "If only IBM listened to me!" ”
So after graduating and working at IBM for less than two years, Gosling jumped to Sun Microsystems, which was a start-up but had been established for ten years, and started the glory days of Java.
James Gosling, who developed Java and became famous
The story of Java began in June 1991, five months after Gosling joined Sun.
At that time, a small team of engineers from Sun Microsystems, led by Gosling, started a project called Green. The goal of this project is to develop a programming language for consumer electronic devices such as smart TVs, set-top boxes, and handheld controllers. These devices require a simple, powerful, portable, and secure language because they have limited memory and processing power, and must communicate with each other over different networks.
At first, the team named the language Greentalk with a .gt file extension. Later, they renamed it Oak in honor of an oak tree outside Gosling's office. Oak has been influenced by several other languages, such as C, C++, Smalltalk, Lisp, and Ada.
However, Oak was not designed for the web, which was emerging as a new platform for distributed computing and information sharing.
In 1993, the Green team demonstrated their technology to Time Warner, the largest media and entertainment company at the time, and Time Warner was interested in using it for interactive television. However, the cable industry was not ready for such an advanced system, and in the end the deal was not closed. As a result, the team turned their attention to the web age, believing that it presented a more promising opportunity for their language.
The team realized that Oak could be used to create dynamic and interactive web pages that could run on any browser that supported the JVM. They created a prototype browser called WebRunner, later renamed HotJava, that could execute Oak applets embedded in HTML pages. Since there was already another language called Oak, they decided to rename Oak to Java.
The name Java was chosen because it was simple, unique, fun, and reminiscent of coffee, which the team consumed in large quantities during long working hours.
At the end of 1994, Gosling first demonstrated Java programs at the Technology, Education, and Design Conference in Silicon Valley.
That same year, Netscape Communications agreed to include Java support in its popular Netscape Navigator browser. This has greatly boosted Java's visibility and exposure, as millions of web users can access Java applets on their browsers.
At the time, Time magazine named Java one of the top 10 best products of 1995.
Since its initial release in 1995, Java has undergone many changes and improvements. Sun Microsystems established the Java Community Process (JCP) in 1998 to allow other companies and organizations to participate in the development and standardization of Java. The JCP oversees the creation and revision of Java specifications that define the syntax and semantics of the language, as well as its libraries and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
Today, after nearly 30 years of iteration, Java is one of the most commonly used programming languages by developers. As one of the co-founders of the Java programming language, Gosling is also recognized as the "father of Java".
Gosling's love-hate feud with Oracle
However, in stark contrast to the development trend of Java, the Sun company behind it began to experience a decline in revenue due to poor management in 2007, and management even bought MySQL for $1 billion in early 2008 in an attempt to turn the tide by spending a lot of money, but nothing was done.
At the end of 2008, it was revealed that IBM was approaching Sun about a possible merger, but negotiations between the two reached an impasse.
As of April 20, 2009, Sun officially announced that it had reached a definitive agreement with Oracle to acquire Sun for $9.50 per share in cash. After deducting Sun's cash and debt, Oracle's offer is $5.6 billion.
Sun's shareholders voted to approve the proposal on July 16, 2009, although the transaction is subject to regulatory approval. Many forces, including the European Union and the U.S. federal government, feared that Sun's acquisition would cause an even bigger storm, so it dragged on for almost a year, culminating in the completion of the acquisition on January 27, 2010, ending Sun's 27-year history.
At the time of the acquisition, core engineers such as Gosling joined Oracle. However, in April 2010, Gosling resolutely chose to leave Oracle.
The reason for his resignation, Gosling once revealed the reason in an exclusive interview with foreign media eWEEK.
"Actually, there were a lot of reasons why I left Oracle. For example, my salary quotes. After receiving their quotes, I tried to calculate the income on my W-2 form (an important tax form for the year on which you earned from your employer, taxes withheld from your paycheck, benefits provided, and other information for the year) and found to be devastated. They copied my base salary at Sun. ”
Gosling revealed that at Sun, any executive at the vice president and above would receive the equivalent of a raise or bonus based on the company's performance. "In a mediocre year, your income is okay, but in a good year, your income will be very high."
"In order to get the privilege of working at Oracle, they wanted me to take a big pay cut," Gosling said.
However, this in itself is not a decisive factor. In fact, under this constraint, Gosling continued to work at the database giant. However, another troubling thing, according to Gosling, is that Oracle doesn't have a concept of a senior engineer, or at least doesn't have a level equivalent to Gosling's rank at Sun, where he is a researcher. "In my job offer, they demoted me quite low," Gosling said in an interview.
But even that wasn't the final factor in his decision to leave the company. Perhaps the last straw that broke the camel's back was Oracle's attempt to control his behavior. After all, after acquiring Sun, Oracle owns Sun and Java, so it owns its founders and their intellectual property, so Oracle can decide what Gosling or others say about Java.
"I barely have any decision-making power at Oracle," Gosling said. "Oracle is an extremely micromanaged company. So neither I nor my colleagues in the Java field have the authority to decide anything. All our decision-making power is gone. ”
What ultimately made Gosling decide to give up his job altogether, "My job seems to be to go on stage and make a public presentation of Oracle's Java. I'm totally ill suited for this kind of work."
In this way, Gosling and the company that ran Java parted ways.
From Google to a startup for marine robotics research to AWS, Gosling's life as a programmer
Gosling joined Google in March 2011 but left in August of the same year. Gosling didn't have much to say about the experience, and he didn't elaborate on what he was primarily responsible for when he was at other companies. In response to this experience, he left only three words on LinkedIn, which translates to "grumpy people anytime, anywhere."
After that, Gosling embarked on a different journey of discovery, moving to Liquid Robotics, a start-up specializing in marine robotics, as a chief software architect for five years. During this time, he spent a lot of time writing software to control autonomous marine robots, and even "diving on a wave glider and then debugging the guidance algorithm." ”
In May 2017, at the age of 62, Gosling announced that he would join Amazon Web Services (AWS) to continue his career as an engineer, focusing on IoT projects and launching AWS Greengrass (https://aws.amazon.com/greengrass/).
Looking back, in 2015, Gosling was awarded the IEEE John von Neumann Medal. In 2018, Gosling was inducted into the Computer History Museum's Wall of Honor for designing and creating the Java language.
Happy retirement, Gosling!
Hearing that the boss has retired, many engineers who have benefited from Java have also sent their blessings to Gosling:
- As a software engineer, we're proud of you. Your contribution to the programming world will be remembered as the golden age of programming. Your language, Java, has changed the world of programming. It is probably the most widely spoken language in the world ever written. Happy retirement
- Enjoy your retirement, James! It was an honor for me to meet you in person a few years ago. My first encounter with Java was in 1997 when I took a computer science course at Berkeley and created a Tower of Hanoi program. Who knew that the world is still using Java today. I still have that 1.1 SDK. Maybe one day I need to run it on my Sparc 20.
- Java has had a profound impact on my inspiration and career. It was amazing that I was working at Sun when Java was launched - never before had a programming language/platform received so much attention!
Finally, congratulations to James Gosling on his retirement and look forward to many more surprises.
Source:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7213740307538956289/ #
https://romanglushach.medium.com/the-evolution-of-java-a-historical-perspective-e15c3d7e5f85
https://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-why-i-quit-oracle/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling#cite_note-oral-4