20th happy birthday for JAVA
When a small team at Sun Microsystems set out to research the future of digital devices in 1990, they could never have guessed that their work would spawn the most popular programming language for enterprise systems. Twenty years later, and Java remains the workhorse of the enterprise, despite its origin as a language for embedded systems and cross-platform, browser-side applications. It’s been a long, strange trip for this programming language, but through it all, the one thing Java has managed to do is stay relevant to modern business needs. “One of the most impressive things about Java,” said Geir Magnusson Jr., founder of the Apache Harmony project, “is that 20 years later we’re talking about it because it’s really relevant. I don’t think you can point to anything that’s 20 years old that’s this relevant. There’s no operating system you can say that about. There’s no other language you can say that about.” Mark Reinhold, chief architect for the Java Platform