Java in 20: How Programming Has Changed Forever

Sound ideas synthesized in Java, rearranging them into a practical format that activated a generation of encoders

Remembering how the programming world was in 1995 is not an easy task. Object-oriented programming, for example, was an accepted but rarely practiced paradigm, and much of what happened as so-called object-oriented programs was little more than a renamed C code that used instead of printing and class in instead of struct. The programs we wrote in those days routinely knocked over the kernel because of pointer arithmetic errors or out of memory due to leaks. The source code can hardly be ported between different versions of Unix. Running the same binary on different processors and operating systems was crazy.

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Java has changed all that. While the platform-dependent C code, manually assigned, will stay with us for the next 20 years, at least Java has proven that this was an option, not a requirement. For the first time, we started writing the actual production code in an object-oriented multidata language, collected from the garbage; and we like ... millions of us.

The languages that came after Java, most notably C #, had to erase the new top bar for the developer productivity that Java established.

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James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, Patrick Naughton and the other Sun's Green Project programmers did not invent most of the important technologies that Java used generalized. Most of the key features that included what was then known as Carvalho found their origins elsewhere:

A base object class from which all classes descend? Chat

Checking strong static types at compile time? Ada.

Multiple interface, single implementation inheritance? Objective C.

Online documentation? CWeb

Cross-platform virtual machine and byte code with just-in-time compilation? Smalltalk again, especially the dialect of the Self of the Sun.

Garbage collection? Lisp

Primitive types and control structures? DO IT.

Dual-type system with primitive non-object types for performance? C ++

However, Java itself has pioneered new territories. Nothing else, like the marked exceptions, is present in any other language, sooner or later. Java was also the first language to use Unicode in the native string type and the source code itself.

But the main strength of Java was that it was built to be a practical tool to get the job done. He popularized good ideas from earlier languages, rearranging them in a format familiar to the average C coder, though (unlike C ++ and Objective-C) Java was not a strict superset of C. In fact, it was precisely this will not only add, but also eliminate features that make Java much simpler and easier to learn than other descendants of object-oriented C.

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Java did not have (and does not yet have) structures, syndicates, types, and header files. An object-oriented language not chained by a requirement to execute the legacy code did not need them. Similarly, Java wisely omitted ideas that were tested and found to be deficient in other languages: multi-implementation inheritance, pointer arithmetic, and operator overload more notably. This good taste at the beginning means that even 20 years later, Java is still relatively free of the warnings "here are dragons" that mess up the style guides of their predecessors.

But the rest of the programming world has not stopped. Thousands of programming languages have increased since we started programming Java, but most never achieved more than a small fraction of collective attention before disappearing. What we sold in Java were applets, small programs that work within web pages that can interact with the user and do more than display text, images and static shapes. Today, this does not seem like much, but remember: in 1995, JavaScript and DOM did not exist, and an HTML form that spoke with a server-side CGI script, written in Perl, was state of the art.

The irony is that the applets never worked very well. They were completely isolated from the content of the page, unable to read or write HTML, since JavaScript could eventually do so. Security restrictions have prevented applets from interacting with the local file system and third-party network servers. These restrictions have made the applets suitable for little more than simple games and animations. Even these trivial evidence of concept were hampered by the poor performance of the first virtual navigation machines.

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And when applet deficiencies were fixed, browsers and application developers for the user had already outgrown Java. Flash, JavaScript, and more recently HTML5 have captured our attention as much more effective platforms for delivering dynamic web content that Java has promised but failed to deliver. Even so, the applets were what inspired us to work with Java and What we discovered was a language that softened many of the rough edges and painful points with which you struggle in alternatives like C ++. The automatic garbage charge was worth the ticket price. The applets may have been overestimated and undelivered, but that did not mean that Java was not a very good language for other problems. Originally designed as a multiplatform client library, Java has found real success in server space. Servlets, Java Server Pages, and a variety of enterprise-centric libraries that have been grouped periodically and changed their name into a confusing acronym or other real problem solved for us and for business.

Leaving aside marketing failures, Java has reached a near-standard status in IT departments around the world. (Fast: What's the difference between Java 2 Enterprise Edition and Java Platform Enterprise Edition? If you guessed J2EE is the successor to JEE, you have exactly the opposite.) Some of these company-focused products were alongside alternative fonts and intense, inspirational add-ins, such as Spring, Hibernate, and Tomcat, but all this relied on Sun's foundation. Probably the most important open source contribution to Java and art program is JUnit.

Test-based development (TDD) had already been tested with Smalltalk. However, like many other innovations in that language, TDD failed to get widespread notification and adoption until it was available in Java. When Kent Beck and Erich Gamma launched JUnit in 2000, TDD has rapidly grown from some experimental practice of some programmers to the standard way of developing software in the 21st century. As Martin Fowler said, "Never in the field of software development were they due either to a few lines of code," and those few lines of code were written in Java. Twenty years since its inception, Java is no longer the beginning disheveled.

He has become the entrenched incumbent against whom other tongues rebel. Lighter languages such as Ruby and Python have made significant strides in Java's territory, especially in the boot community, where speed of development counts more than strength and scale, a compromise that Java leveraged at the outset when machine performance data the compiled code. Java, of course, does not stop. Oracle continues to incorporate well-proven technologies from other languages, such as generics, autobox, enumerations and, more recently, lambda expressions. Many programmers have found these ideas in Java. Not all programmers know Java, but whether they know it or not, all programmers today have been influenced by it.