In 1977, James Gosling received a B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary. In 1983, he earned a Ph.D in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and his doctoral thesis was titled "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints".

While working towards his doctorate, he wrote a version of emacs (gosmacs), and before joining Sun Microsystems he built a multi-processor version of Unix[ while at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as several compilers and mail systems.

Since 1984, Gosling has been with Sun Microsystems, and is generally known best as the father of the Java programming language.