The hire was quite the win for Google, which is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with Java's owner, Oracle, over some uses of Java in the Android stack.
Gosling said in a blog post on the move, "I don't know what I'll be working on. I expect it'll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon." Call us psychic, but we're willing to bet Gosling will be working on the Android platform.
Gosling developed Java while he was an employee at Sun Microsystems. The project began in 1991, and the language was released in 1995.
But when Sun was acquired by Oracle in a deal that closed in January 2010, Gosling left the company a few months later. At the time, he said, "Just about anything I could say [about Oracle] that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good." He's since been notably cynical about Oracle's treatment of the Java language and community, even going so far as to call Oracle CEO Larry Ellison "Larry, Prince of Darkness."