Happy 22nd Birthday Java!

A few days late, but this past Tuesday Java turned 22.

There is a very nice article and video by Jamie Mercer at I Programmer.

As Mr. Mercer points out regarding the initial requirements:

"There were five requirements from this experiment. The new language had to: 

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

I often bring up that I think the phrase, "Write Once, Run Anywhere" was a HUGE factor in its success because EVERYONE could understand those four words versus listing the five requirements above.
 
I do remember seeing slides on what Mr. Mercer speaks about below:

"The first attempts looked at combining C and Mesa, producing an object-oriented environment in C++, and Gosling even tried creating a new form of C++ which he called C++ ++ -- which is a bit of a mouthful, to say the least.

C++ would be cast aside as it required too much memory and had a tendency to lead to developer errors thanks to its complexity due largely to developers having to manually manage the system memory."

In my office I have a James Gosling signed t-shirt of the 10th Anniversary of Java.  Oh, the good ole days.....