James Gosling is the computer scientist most closely associated with the creation of Java. His Computer History Museum profile records that he was recruited by Sun cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim in 1984 and spent the next 26 years at Sun Microsystems, working on early projects such as the NeWS windowing system before turning to the work that made him famous.
According to that profile, “In June 1991, Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton initiated the Java language project,” which was called “The Green Project” at the time. The effort began as a way to build software for networked consumer devices, but it grew into a general-purpose language and runtime aimed at running the same program on many different kinds of machines.
The museum credits Gosling “for the conception, design, and implementation of the Java programming language.” He created the original language design and wrote the first compiler and virtual machine, the pieces that let Java code be compiled once into portable bytecode and then run on any system with a Java runtime.
Gosling stayed at Sun until shortly after Oracle’s acquisition of the company in 2010. His role in shaping Java, one of the most widely used programming languages in the history of business software, is why he is commonly called “the father of Java.”