Chapter 1. History and Retrospective
The first public release of Java was May 23, 1995, as an alpha available only on Sun Microsystem’s Solaris operating system. Since that first release, Java has developed into one of the world’s most widely deployed programming environments. It has gained traction and market share in essentially every programming environment, especially enterprise software, server-side Web development, and mobile phone programming.
Java is a blue collar language. It’s not PhD thesis material but a language for a job.
James Gosling
It has been a long journey with many surprises along the way. That journey started in the early days with James Gosling and his team, who were sure that developers wanted advanced productivity features (such as object orientation and garbage collection), but felt that many engineers were scared off by the complexity of the languages that implemented them.
The High-Level Design of Java
In language design terms, Java has always been based on a number of deliberate, opinionated design decisions with specific goals in mind. The Java platform’s initial primary goals can be summed up as:
-
To provide a container for simple execution of object-oriented application code
-
To remove tedious bookkeeping from the hands of developers and make the platform responsible for accounting for memory
-
To remove C/C++ platform security vulnerabilities wherever possible
-
To allow cross-platform execution
Notably, these goals were pursued even at ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access