Contents
Chapter Six

Java

Java aspired to be Smalltalk but instead created Simula.

The Java language popularized two fundamental technologies:

  1. Automatic Memory Management.
  2. Virtual Machines.

They also made some questionable design decisions:

  1. All is OOP. This came from Smalltalk
  2. Operator Overloading is Too Hard. This is true if you have to do your own memory management as we saw in the C++ chapter, but if you have a garbage collector it becomes relatively easy (see Python).