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Java is an abomination. Not as a programming language per se, but as a systems programming language! It was never intended for the uses we find it in today, and we all suffer for it. I got my first Java compiler directly from the inventor, James Gosling, back in 1995 when we both gave invited papers at the IEEE manufacturing engineering conference in Boston. His intention for the language at the time was to build applets for web browsers. The language wasn't officially released by Sun until about 5 years later.