History of the Language
The story of the Java language is well known by this point. James Gosling and other
developers at Sun were working on an interactive TV project in the mid-1990s when
Gosling became frustrated with the language being used—C++, an object-oriented programming
language developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at AT&T Bell Laboratories 10 years
earlier as an extension of the C language.
Gosling holed up in his office and created a new language that was suitable for his project
and addressed some of the things that frustrated him about C++.
Sun’s interactive TV effort failed, but its work on the language had unforeseen applicability
to a new medium that was becoming popular at the same time: the Web.
Java was released by Sun in fall 1995. Although most of the language’s features were
primitive compared with C++ (and Java today), Java programs called applets could be
run as part of web pages on the Netscape Navigator browser.
This functionality—the first interactive programming available on the Web—helped publicize
the new language and attract several hundred thousand developers in its first six
months.