Java is celebrating its twentieth anniversary. In 1995, Sun Micrososystems introduced an object-oriented programming language called “Oak” that eventually became Java. According to Oracle, which bought Sun in 2010, Java is now downloaded 1 billion times per year, and it runs on 97 percent of enterprise desktops.
“Java is the only other language, besides C and C++, that has survived the test of time over all these years,” says Red Hat’s Arun Gupta. “All the major industries run some form of Java in their mission-critical deployments. Only a technological apocalypse would render Java irrelevant in the future.”
