In the cyber world, some people are destined to become famous, like Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. You can see him everywhere, wearing round glasses and smiling on the screen. However, there are also others who work just as well as Gates but are fated to fade into obscurity, forgotten in the vastness of the internet.
I want to talk about James Gosling, the father of the Java programming language. If you haven't studied Java, probably very few people would know the name of this 58-year-old uncle, yet his influence, I believe, is no less than that of Gates. People "love" Gates because he brought the world a visible operating system; however, no one says "I love Gosling," even though the programming language he founded appears in our daily lives—oh yes, it also appears in Gates' life.
In 1994, Gosling demonstrated Java at a conference in Silicon Valley, introducing it to the world—a language that would later become one of the most popular computer languages globally. This may sound a bit abstruse, but you can understand it this way—without Java, humans would be like babies unable to speak. A large number of programs today are written in Java, including the software on NASA's lunar probe.
One of Java's standout advantages is "write once, run anywhere." This phrase might not seem extraordinary, but for programmers, it was like rescuing them from the grueling old days of coding. Without Java, if a programmer developed an excellent set of code at home and wanted to report it to their boss, they would have to go to the boss's house, recompile the code on a device with a different hardware configuration, spending lots of time debugging and running it again.
Imagine how terrible that would be! My programmer friends always complain about staying up all night debugging code, which is hard and undervalued. Although saying this in front of someone who stays up all night writing articles might hurt feelings, the feeling of despair after working through the night without success is universally understood.
Java became their savior, although it wasn’t originally Gosling’s intention. The laid-back Gosling didn’t have the time to worry about other people’s troubles; he just wanted to complete the programming task assigned by his boss. He was supposed to use C++ to develop a basic technology platform that could be used interchangeably between various household appliances, functioning both on TV set-top boxes and telephones. Gosling wasn’t very familiar with C++, and he suffered greatly—frequent crashes, error messages, etc. Frustrated and too lazy to flip through textbooks to learn, he quickly made a decision: why not create a programming language to solve this problem?
Gosling said, “Let there be Java,” and thus Java was born, along with the Java platform. According to statistics, by 2012, there were tens of millions of Java developers worldwide, forming the largest professional developer community globally. Java is widely used in personal computers, data centers, game consoles, scientific supercomputers, mobile phones, and the internet.
Don’t think these things don’t concern you. Even many applications on your Android smartphone require Java for development. It has become something akin to oxygen—impossible to live without.
If Gosling had been more clever back then, like Coco Chanel, putting his name into the brand, his name would certainly be known on every street corner.
But Gosling simply didn’t care about such things. When asked to name it, he couldn’t be bothered to think much about it. He glanced out the window at an oak tree and decided to call it "Oak." At the trademark registration center, he found that even this peculiar name had already been registered. He called his partners, who were equally laid-back, sitting in a coffee shop drinking coffee from Java Island in Indonesia. They looked at the steaming coffee beside them and quickly decided to call it Java.
And so, Mr. Gosling missed his chance at widespread fame, seemingly without regret. He went to Oracle, then moved to Google, worked there for a while, and quit, issuing a statement saying, "Folks, I've run away again...this time, to find a new path!"
Later, a journalist was truly puzzled—what exactly was Gosling doing? So, he went to visit our father of Java. After searching high and low, he found Gosling buried in a small startup company in Silicon Valley, developing ocean robots.
He was developing a fully automatic robot capable of traveling alone across the vast Pacific Ocean, collecting information about the immense sea—its temperature, wave height, water quality, chemical composition… This data helps us analyze global climate change in the long term and solve environmental pollution issues in the short term. Gosling proudly told the visiting journalist, "What's cooler than an ocean robot?"
After that, I heard very little about him. Every day on the internet, many faces appear—the CEO of Apple introduces a new phone, the founders of Google have affairs, the head of Microsoft is retiring—but rarely does the father of Java or those like him, who created programming languages, show up. But who knows? Maybe one day these people will re-emerge, bringing us another revolutionary gift, just like Java did back then?
To be honest, I had almost forgotten about this pioneer. The rapid development of the network leaves little time for reminiscing. I am always busy opening web pages, chasing American dramas, refreshing Taobao, and only occasionally, when waiting for software to load and the steaming coffee logo of Java pops up, do I suddenly remember Gosling, our father of Java.