It was 20 years ago today…
A lot of Beatle’s songs have been running through my head this last little while, but Sgt. Pepper is getting most of the mental traffic. In part this is because of a recent personal anniversary (will you still need me?) but mostly because it was 20 years ago that Java(tm) was first made public. My, how time flies.
There was actually a bit of a debate on the JavaSoft (that was the part of Sun that was responsible for Java) mailing lists; the first public release of the alpha technology preview of Java went out March 27, 1995, while the first announcement of the language and environment was during the Sun Developers Conference held May 20-something in that year. To give a bit of context, that was the same Sun Developer’s Conference when the Memo of Understanding between Sun and Netscape that placed Java in the browser was announced. For those of you who don’t know what Netscape was, go look it up. At the time, Netscape was a much bigger deal than Java, but time has a way of changing those things.
Java had actually been wandering around Sun internally for a couple of years before that; during the 10 year anniversary I found that I had the electronic copy of the oldest known (then) spec for the language, which you can see here. First note that the language was not then called Java. It was originally named Oak, after the tree outside of James Gosling’s office. But the trademark folks said that name was already taken, so the commercial name was changed to Java. The rest, as they say, is history.
The Oak spec is recognizably Java, but is also different. The exception mechanism at the time did not require that exceptions be declared or caught; this was changed before the first official release. The language was a lot smaller (full description in under 30 pages), and the mass of libraries, frameworks, and imported features from other languages weren’t there. This is a snapshot of Java in its purer form, before it became important enough to be fought over by different companies, before the community process, and before all those who wanted it to be something else had their way with it.
I still like to program in Java (the Standard Edition; don’t get me started on the Enterprise Edition), since at its core it is still the simple, object-oriented, strongly typed language that it started out being. I do use generics, even though I hate the way they were implemented and argued against them (and still think they aren’t needed). I’m glad to see lambdas introduced, although I could have lived without them. And I do sometimes wish that we had had a few more years to develop the language before it became the global phenomenon it became. But it ruled much of my life in technology, and it was fun.
So happy birthday, Java. And thanks for all the good times. The bad ones weren’t your fault…
