Earlier quoted context omitted.
A university professor that created the Modula-2 compiler sold by Borland, and was one of the Pizza compiler designers, which contributed to Java generics. Not your regular university professor, rather someone with industry experience, specially in the Java world.
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…
That is part of "was one of the Pizza compiler designers".