An Introduction To Java And Its History
Java is currently one of the most influential programming languages among many other programming languages .The origin and invention of Java started in the year 1990, when an American company that was leading the revolution in the computer industry decided to gather its best engineers together to design and develop a product that would allow them to become an important player in the new emerging Internet world. Among those engineers was James Arthur Gosling, a Canadian computer scientist who is recognized as the “father” of the Java programming language.
James Arthur Gosling
( Father Of Java Programming Language )
It would take five years of design, programming, and one rename (from Oak to Java because of trademark issues), but finally in 1996, Java 1.0 was released for Linux, Solaris, Mac, and Windows. You might have the tendency to skip this chapter altogether. But I think it would be a mistake. I was never much interested in the history of Java. I was using it for work. I knew that James Gosling was the creator and that Oracle bought Sun, and that was pretty much it. I never cared much about how the language evolved, where the inspiration came from, or how one version was different from another. I started learning Java at version 1.5, and I took a lot of things in the language for granted. So, when I was assigned to a project running on Java 1.4, I was quite confused, because I did not know why some of the code I wrote was not compiling. Although the IT industry is moving very fast, there will always be that one client that has a legacy application. And knowing the peculiarities of each Java version is an advantage, because you know the issues when performing a migration. When I started doing research for this blog, I was mesmerized. The history of Java is interesting because it is a tale of incredible growth, success of a technology, and how a clash of egos in management almost killed the company that created it. Because even if Java is the most used technology in software development, it is simply paradoxical that the company that gave birth to it no longer exists.
There are the five main goals that was looked through in the creation Java language:
- It must be simple, object-oriented, and familiar.
- It must be robust and secure.
- It must execute with high performance.
- It must be architecture-neutral and portable.
- It must be interpreted, threaded, and dynamic.
You can find a timeline for versions 1.0 to 1.8 on the Oracle official site at
We as a programmers owe to Sir James Arthur Gosling from creating such an amazing programming language.
