On this day in 1995 Sun Microsystems Inc. officially announced the programming language Java and its accompanying Web browser HotJava to an audience at the SunWorld ‘95 convention. Java is a general-purpose computer programming language that was intended to let application developers “write once, run anywhere,” which meant that compiled Java code could run on any supported platform with no need for recompilation.
Java was originally developed by Canadian computer scientist James Gosling at Sun Microsystems, and was officially released in 1995. As of 2016, it is considered one of the most popular programming languages in use, with a reported 9 million developers using it worldwide.