I don't think he has a close BDFL-style involvement with the Java SDK or standard library. From what I can observe, Java is, and has been, committee-driven since about 2000.

And Gosling is too expensive to write code. His time is much better used in conferences, motivating developers.

I find it funny how you can be too expensive to code. I wonder when was the last time billionaires like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin coded for a large project just for the love of coding.

Has Steve Jobs ever coded?, I know Gates and Brin did at some point. A quick search revealed a quote from Wozniak: "Steve jobs never programmed in his life." http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2006/10/5672.ars

Wow, I had no idea. Thanks for the info. According to Wikipedia, he worked at Atari creating circuit board for games.

Legend says he sub-hired Woz for a fraction of what he was being paid.

At that time, games were "programmed" with hardware too, so, it would no qualify as a programming job.

He used to do all the coding demos at NeXT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A (his little database app starts at 23:10)

I don't remember having seen his name for a long time in any technical discussion or decision involving Java, besides Closures, where he co-authored the BGGA proposal. Although it appears that Gafter and Bracha put more work in that one. Even then he did not apparently have enough say on the matter to make his blessed proposal official. His main role seems to be an evangelist for the platform and perhaps researcher for some more involved areas, like real-time systems and numerical processing, AFAICT from his blog posts.