In 1990, Sun Microsystems employees were growing tired
with C and C++. Engineer Patrick Naughton was frustrated at Sun’s APIs and was
given the opportunity to do something about it; he would create an alternative
language as part of The Stealth Project. The Stealth Project was soon renamed
the Green Project and Naughton was joined by Mike Sheridan and James Gosling to
create what later became Java. That’s 22 years ago!
Ironically, Amazon Web Services has chosen the
anniversary period to sign up computer science heavyweight James Gosling, often
referred to as the “Father of Java,”. Amazon made the announcement on Facebook
this week, that he would be joining the cloud provider as a distinguished
engineer.
Gosling came up with the original design of Java and
implemented its first compiler and virtual machine as part of his work at Sun
Microsystems. He left Sun in 2010 after the company was acquired by Oracle,
spent a short time at Google, and most recently worked at Liquid Robotics
designing software for an underwater robot.
Amazon confirmed that Gosling had joined the company
but didn’t offer any further comment on the work he would be doing there.
Gosling will join other tech luminaries, including Adrian Cockroft, Swami
Sivasubramanian, and Werner Vogels.
While it’s unclear exactly what he’ll be working on,
Gosling seems like a natural fit for the teams creating AWS’s tools for the
Internet of Things. He’s intimately familiar with the process of deploying IoT
systems, as well as the challenges that arise when it comes to using the public
cloud with IoT.
“In my case, there are no cloud providers [Liquid
Robotics] can use, so we end up rolling our own for everything, which is a real
pain,” Gosling said at IP Expo Europe in 2016, when discussing IoT systems. “I
mean, a lot of the cloud providers would make my life hugely easier, but
convincing [a] random Coast Guard from some random country that they should
trust Amazon is really, really hard.”
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