About Java

Java is a general-purpose programming, object-oriented language that was intended to be as platform-indepdendent as possible, i.e. "write once, run anywhere" (WORA). Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of computer architecture.

Java has consisently remained one of the most popular languages in the world, if not the most popular. It was designed by James Gosling, a Canadian computer scientist who obtained his Bachelor of Science from the University of Calgary and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, all in computer science. It was created in 1995 while Gosling worked at Sun Microsystems where he workerd for 26 years. Gosling left Sun in 2010 after it was acquired by the Oracle Corporation.


Photo by: Peter Campbell

Gosling left Oracle to work at Google, but shortly thereafter joined a startup called Liquid Robotics, which was subsequently acquired by Boeing. As of 2017, Gosling worked at Amazon Web Services as Distinguished Engineer. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling

Gosling is known for his love of proving "the unknown" and favorite irrational number is √2. He has a framed picture of the first 1,000 digits of √2 in his office. As a tribute to him, I provide this link to a wbe page with the first 10 million digits of the https://apod.nasa.gov/htmltest/gifcity/sqrt2.10mil.

There were five primary goals in the creation of the Java language:

  1. It must be "simple, object-oriented, and familiar".
  2. It must be "robust and secure".
  3. It must be "architecture-neutral and portable".
  4. It must execute with "high performance".
  5. It must be "interpreted, threaded, and dynamic".