Java is a general purpose, object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems of USA in 1991. Java was originally called Oak language by James Gosling, one of the inventors of the language. Java was designed for the development of software for consumer electronic devices such as TVs, VCRs and other such electronic devices. The goal has a strong impact on the development team to make the language simple, portable and highly reliable.
The Java team, which included Patrick Naughton discovered that the existing languages like C and C++ had limitations in terms of both portability and reliability. However, they modeled their new language Java on C and C++ but removed a number a features of C and C++ that were considered as source problems and thus made Java a really simple, reliable, portable and powerful language.
The designed of Java thought hard about what makes C++ code buggy. They added features to Java that eliminated the possibility of creating code with the most kind of bugs.
- The Java designers eliminated manual memory allocation and deallocation. Memory in Java is automatically garbage collected. You never have to worry about memory leaks.
- They eliminated multiple inheritance, replacing with new notion of interface that they derived from Objective C.