You forgot to also mention that he was the original author of the Java 5 compiler which Sun took over. He is definitely not a guy in an ivory tower, almost the exact opposite in fact. But ivory towers are not necessarily bad. It was precisely an ivory table that gave us Lisp and Haskell. Lisp's Garbage Collector was a big influence on the original Java. And Java's chief architect has specifically mentioned Haskell as his influence in the future of Java.