Interesting Facts about Java

Java was built by sheer accident, a team of developers were busy building a set top box, and began cleaning C++. When they were winding up these changes, they ended up discovering Java and its runtime environment.

Many of you might be aware of this, but for those who aren’t, Java wasn’t the original name that was decided for this language. It was ‘Oak’. Sun Marketing system changed the name later when they realized that a company named ‘Oak’ existed.

It is a widely used language all over the world, and is considered to be a favourite amongst the developer group, and is the second most popular programming most of the times during surveys.

There are 3 billion phones and counting number of mobile phones that are running with the help of a platform built using Java.

The most popular game of all time, ‘Minecraft’ was written in Java. Notch, the creator of ‘Minecraft’ wrote the game in Java, which was later acquired by Microsoft, and a new version of the game was released in C++.

The keyword ‘final’ can be used with class, variable, method and field. This way, all of the attributes become unchangeable, i.e a final class can’t be extended, a final variable can’t be changed, a final method can’t be overridden, and a final field is a constant.

There are two aspects of Java that make it dynamic, Java instrumentations and Java reflections. Java instrumentations helps in modifying pre-compiled classes, if the code needs to be changed at run time. Java Reflections help in viewing the private variables of specific classes.

While using C++, many of us would have been frustrated and confused with the concept of pointers and how they work. Luckily, in Java, there is no concept of pointers, since the makers thought adding pointers would hamper the robustness of the language.