Saturday, December 29, 2007

Java- How did the name come??

I have been studying Java for quite some time now. Once lost in oblivion while studying java, a question popped up in my mind. Why did the creator of java--James Gosling--named it java. My goofy mind gave several possible explanatios- he might be a native of Java islands, or he might have thought of some concept of the language while he was holidaying on java islanda....

I finally referred wikipedia to find out. Here is what it says-"The language was initially called Oak, after an oak tree that stood outside Gosling's office - and also went by the name Green - and ended up later being renamed to Java, from a list of random words."

So, java was nomenclatured randomly..?? I cant buy this proposition. It is still an enigma for me that why only "Java"??

1 comment:

Rahul Mathur said...

Was in search for the answer for many days. After reading accounts of several of the key people at Sun involved in the naming process (Frank Yellin, a senior engineer at Sun; Kim Polese, then the Oak product manager and now CEO of Marimba Inc) I have come to the following conclusion.

The lawyers had told Sun that they couldn't use the name 'OAK' because it was already trademarked by Oak Technologies. So a brainstorming session was held to come up with ideas for a new name. The session was attended by all members of what was then called the Live Oak group, those who were actively working on the new language. They wanted something that reflected the essence of the technology: dynamic, revolutionary, lively, fun. Because this programming language was so unique, they were determined to avoid nerdy names. They wanted something that was cool, unique, and easy to spell and fun to say. The team gathered together in a room, wrote up on the whiteboard words like DNA, Silk, Ruby, and WRL, for WebRunner Language. The name [Java] emerged during that session.

 
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