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