James Gosling, known as “the father of Java” for his work on the programming language at Sun Microsystems, left Oracle (which bought Sun) on April 2. The move was announced on his blog, where he also gave no reason for the decision. Gosling had been something of a mascot at Sun, where his job description for the last few years had been “accepter of adulation,” rather than “developer of innovation.”
Gosling wrote about the move on his blog. “Yes, indeed, the rumors are true: I resigned from Oracle a week ago (April 2nd). I apologize to everyone in St. Petersburg who came to Tech Days on Thursday expecting to hear from me. I really hated not being there.
“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. The hardest part is no longer being with all the great people I’ve had the privilege to work with over the years. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, other than take some time off before I start job hunting,” he wrote.
Gosling created Java as a programming language for a never-released universal remote control designed in Sun Microsystems’ labs. The language was first released to the public in 1995, and it quickly became the focus of Sun’s software development business. By 1998, Java 2 (1.2) was released, and the Java revolution had begun.
