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.

Between 1984 and 2010, Gosling was with Sun Microsystems. He is known as the father of the Java programming language.

On April 2, 2010, Gosling left Sun Microsystems which had recently been acquired by the Oracle Corporation. Regarding why he left, Gosling wrote on his blog that "Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good." He has since taken a very critical stance towards Oracle in interviews.

He is generally credited as the inventor of the Java programming language in 1994. He created the original design of Java and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. For this achievement he was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering. He has also made major contributions to several other software systems, such as NeWS and Gosling Emacs. He co-wrote the "bundle" program, a utility thoroughly detailed in Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike's book The Unix Programming Environment.

In 2007, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. The Order is Canada's highest civilian honour. Officers are the second highest grade.