James Gosling, the father of Java programming language, is leaving Google just after five months of joining the company, as stated in his blog post.

“I’ve surprised myself and made another career change. I had a great time at Google, met lots of interesting people, but I met some folks outside doing something completely outrageous, and after much anguish decided to leave Google”

Gosling created Java while he was still at Sun Microsystems, and moved to Oracle when the company acquired Sun Microsystems last year.  He left shortly after the acquisition and joined Google last March.   Though he wasn’t sure what he would be working on at Google, he was excited at the thought of being able to work on anything.

But as free spirits go, Gosling is now ready for a new adventure.  He will be joining the startup company Liquid Robotics, where he will work as chief software architect.  Bill Vass, Liquid Robotics CEO and former Sun Microsystems colleague, was the one who recruited Gosling.

Liquid Robotics designs the autonomous vehicles called Wave Gliders.  It’s an unmanned maritime vehicle (UMV) that cruises the ocean at one or two knots by propelling itself using waves, trawling for data that gets uploaded to the cloud via WiMAX, GSM, and satellite uplinks. Each unit can stay out for years at a time and one has been out in the water for 2.5 years doing tasks such as testing the water for leaks around oil rigs or measuring the radioactivity of the ocean outside of the Fukushima nuclear reactor facility in Japan.

And this is where Gosling is needed.  He will be involved in both the onboard software – sensing, navigation and autonomy – and in the datacenter to dealing with the in-rush of data.  These Wave Gliders can harvest natural energy and can be used for commercial, scientific and defense purposes.  The data collected by the Wave Gliders is used by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and various other oceanographic facilities.  Back in June, Liquid Robotics closed a $22 million round of financing that is deemed a solid start for a Silicon Valley startup.

“The first time Bill described it to me, my first reaction was you’re kidding,” Gosling said in an interview. “The notion of having a fleet of autonomous ocean-going vehicles wandering the world collecting data is something out of fiction.”

Some may argue that outer-space is the final frontier, but there is still much to explore in our oceans, and wonders waiting to be discovered.  And the mysteriousness of the ocean together with being able to utilize his skills in this endeavor was what made Gosling choose this path.

“Liquid Robotics can totally change the way we look at oceans. We’ll be able to get a wide variety of detailed data more cheaply and pervasively than any other way. It involves a large data problem and a large-scale control problem, both of which are fascinating to me and have been passions of mine for years.”