Java
Java
Java, modern object-oriented computer programming language.
- Key People:
- Bill Joy
Java was created at Sun Microsystems, Inc., where James Gosling led a team of researchers in an effort to create a new language that would allow consumer electronic devices to communicate with each other. Work on the language began in 1991, and before long the team’s focus changed to a new niche, the World Wide Web. Java was first released in 1995, and Java’s ability to provide interactivity and multimedia showed that it was particularly well suited for the Web.

The difference between the way Java and other programming languages worked was revolutionary. Code in other languages is first translated by a compiler into instructions for a specific type of computer. The Java compiler instead turns code into something called Bytecode, which is then interpreted by software called the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), or the Java virtual machine. The JRE acts as a virtual computer that interprets Bytecode and translates it for the host computer. Because of this, Java code can be written the same way for many platforms (“write once, run anywhere”), which helped lead to its popularity for use on the Internet, where many different types of computers may retrieve the same Web page.
By the late 1990s Java had brought multimedia to the Internet and started to grow beyond the Web, powering consumer devices (such as cellular telephones), retail and financial computers, and even the onboard computer of NASA’s Mars exploration rovers. Because of this popularity, Sun created different varieties of Java for different purposes, including Java SE for home computers, Java ME for embedded devices, and Java EE for Internet servers and supercomputers. In 2010 the Oracle Corporation took over the management of Java when it acquired Sun Microsystems.
Despite the similarity in names, the JavaScript language that was designed to run in Web browsers is not part of Java. JavaScript was developed in 1995 at Netscape Communications Corp. and was conceived of as a companion
Perl
Perl, a cross-platform open-source computer programming language used widely in the commercial and private computing sectors. Perl was a favourite in the late 20th and early 21st centuries among Web developers for its flexible, continually evolving text-processing and problem-solving capabilities.
In December 1987 American programmer and linguist Larry Wall first released Perl 1.0 for computers running the UNIX operating system. This first version was an intuitive, easily coded language for scanning, extracting, and printing information from text files; in addition, Perl could handle many system management tasks. Perl, which has sometimes been said to stand for “practical extraction and report language,” was influenced by existing programming languages—such as C, BASIC, and AWK—but it also reflected Wall’s linguistic background in its extensive use of common English
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