Gosling resigned on April 2 and has not yet taken a job elsewhere, he reported.

"As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good," he wrote.

Gosling was the chief technology officer for Oracle's client software group and, before that, the of Sun's developer products group.

In 1991, he a small group of engineers in a project, then called Oak, to build an object-oriented programming language that would run on a virtual machine, which would allow programs to run on multiple platforms, such as television set-top boxes. This work evolved into Java, which took off in conjunction with the growing use of the Internet, thanks in part to its into the Netscape browser.

Gosling follows a number of other noted ex-Sun employees out the door since Oracle's purchase of the company was in January, including CEO , and XML co-inventor .