What is Java?
Java is one of the most popular & used programming languages. It is one of the two main programming languages to build native Android applications.
Java was first released in 1995 by Sun Microsystems (now owned by Oracle Corporation). It was initially designed for use in the distributed environment of the Internet — meaning it can work simultaneously in many environments… It was designed to have the “look and feel” of the C++ programming language (we will come back to that one later, no worries) but it is simpler to use than C++ and enforces an object-oriented programming model.
Historically, one of the main advantages of Java was that it runs on pretty much every operating system. So when a developer would write its code on a MacOS, another developer would be able to run the same code on Linux or Windows.
When Java started, this was not obvious. If you were writing JavaScript before 2009 (and the creation of Node.js), you would only be able to run it in the browser, if you were writing C# before 2016 (and the creation of .NET Core), you were only able to run it on Windows. Writing an application once and being able to run it on multiple operating systems, thereby saving time and money, is one of the main reasons Java was adopted by a lot of companies and developers and has become so popular.
Today, an enormous amount of applications and websites will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Amongst many, the popular Netflix, Airbnb, and Uber run with Java.
Java is often compared to other programming languages like Kotlin, Scala, and Groovy. This is because they share the same Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Similar to what Node.js does for JavaScript, the JVM translates Java, Kotlin, Scala and Groovy code into something that the computer can understand and execute. So you can think of Java, Kotlin, Scala, and Groovy as languages that can all be translated by the same machine.
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