Also, I'm not sure that of all of Gosling's achievements, I would point to Java-the-language (or the UTTERLY GODAWFUL initial libraries) as a particular exemplar of elegance. NeWS was much, much, much more interesting and forward-thinking, for one.
Perhaps I'm overstating Gosling's contributions to NeWS, or perhaps he was in fact an elegance sink, and the reason NeWS lost out to the unutterably execrable X-Windows was because he was on the project.
If you like NeWS then I can recommend trying to find out about Arthur van Hoff's HyperNeWS which was, as the name suggests, a HyperCard like system but written in NeWS.
his phd thesis was pretty cool. It's one approach at a constraint solver built into a language. I can't, off the top of my head think of any direct application (maybe some prolog variant), but it's a neat way to model stuff.
