Java: 20 years of continuous innovation

May 23 This year is the first edition of the Java 20 anniversary of the official launch of the day. Its launch accompanies and facilitates the development of the web, boosts productivity, and brings new ways of interacting with consumers.

As a widely used programming language, Java has played an important role in the popularization and popularization of technology. For example, the big data revolution was caused by Java.

For businesses, many servers are deployed with Java applications, and many IoT devices are developed based on Java technology.

20 years ago, Java brought unprecedented technological ideas to people: write once, run everywhere.

Prior to that, there were few programming languages, and mostly for fixed purposes: Fortran was used for scientific computing, COBOL was commercial, c and the rising C + + was used for business programming.

In addition, there are some non-mainstream languages. For example, the ADA for defense projects, Pascal, popular among enthusiasts and SME advisors, Smalltalk in academia and Lisp, Perl, which is beloved by system administrators, and so on. However, the 3 major languages described above were dominated at the time.

The tired C language

People are getting bored with the C language, which has 2 disadvantages: First, C is too focused on the underlying requirements, and it takes a lot of instruction to simply perform simple tasks. Second, portability is poor, which means that code written for a PC cannot be easily ported to small devices or large hosts to run.

Of course, if developed for the underlying application, C's performance is quite powerful, allowing developers to unleash their creativity as freely as possible. However, for large software projects, C can bring unimaginable pain to the relevant implementers.

Despite the 1995 years, many C-language vendors have introduced tools that conform to the 1989 ISO standard, but many of the extended features that come with them make it impossible to migrate across platforms.

The disadvantages of C language eventually spawned a new generation of programming languages. In the 1995 alone, Ruby, PHP, Java, and JavaScript appeared.

Because Java has a strong portability and a rich library of functions, it quickly became popular. The slogan "Write once, run everywhere" is not strictly possible, but it has increased significantly compared to previous languages.

Since then, IBM's endorsement of Java has laid a significant role in the field of business programming.

Once a language becomes mainstream, its life cycle becomes extraordinarily long.

Java's introduction of virtual machine technology is one of its most unique concepts, which allows portability to be rooted in the early stages of a project. However, the disadvantage of high portability is the slow start and run times.

Continuous improvement

Today, Java is running at a very high level of efficiency and also has a huge throughput capability, which has been proven on a variety of big data projects. Now Java has become capable of a variety of tasks.

With the advent of Java 8, the language already has a variety of popular programming concepts, which are shorter, more reliable and more expressive.

The history of Java is well known to us. However, it is easy to overlook the point that the success of Java comes from the continuous large-scale technology investment, and not many languages can be favored by vendors to make a variety of improvements. Except for Java, I'm afraid only Microsoft's C # is treated like this.

20-year-old Java has come to maturity, and let us expect its future to become more brilliant.

Finally, a few good books on Java are recommended:

"Recommended Good book" Excellent Java programming style, high salary to see

Java: 20 years of continuous innovation