Gilad Bracha

Gilad Bracha
Gilad Bracha 2006
Alma mater	University of Utah
Thesis	The Programming Language 'Jigsaw': Mixins, Modularity and Multiple Inheritance (1991)
Doctoral advisor	Gary Lindstrom
Website http://www.bracha.org/

Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language, a software engineer at Google and a member of the Dart (programming language) team. He is a co-author of the second and third editions of the Java Language Specification, and a major contributor to the second edition of the Java Virtual Machine Specification.

Between 1994 and 1997, he worked on the Smalltalk system developed by Animorphic Systems, a company that was bought by Sun in 1997. From 1997 to 2006, he worked at Sun Microsystems as Computational Theologist and, as of 2005, Distinguished Engineer, on various aspects of the specification and implementation of Java. Following that, he was Distinguished Engineer at Cadence Design Systems from 2006 to 2009, where he led a team of developers designing and implementing Newspeak.

Bracha received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.

In 2006, Gilad Bracha together with Neal Gafter, James Gosling, and Peter von der Ahé (collectively BGGA) drafted a specification for adding closures to the Java programming language version 6. The proposal has been criticized by Joshua Bloch on terms of being needlessly complex (adding function types and non-local returns) while providing little benefit for the average Java programmer over other simpler proposals. Closures were added to Java 8, but based on a different proposal than the BGGA one.