James Gosling
Major
Accomplishment: Gosling
is generally credited with having invented the Java programming language in
1994. He created the original design of Java and implemented the language's
original compiler and virtual machine. Gosling traces the origins of the
approach to his early 19s graduate-student days, when he created a pseudo-code
(p-code) virtual machine for the lab's DEC VAX computer, so that his professor
could run programs written in UCSD Pascal. Pascal compiled into p-code to
foster precisely this kind of portability. In the work leading to Java at Sun,
he saw that architecture-neutral execution for widely distributed programs
could be achieved by implementing a similar philosophy: always program for the
same virtual machine.