Java was a three-day hotfix away from dying horribly on stage

If there is a driving theme to The Java Story documentary, which debuted Friday on YouTube, it would be that even some of the most important and popular technologies come from humble beginnings. In this case, we're talking about a language that started life as a failed attempt at set-top box dominance and required a massive rewrite just days before its big conference debut. Today, Java consistently hovers near the top of the TIOBE programming language popularity index and remains widely used for large enterprise applications. But at one point in 1994, Sun Microsystems was just about to abandon the effort. Tim Lindholm, who was hired to polish up a virtual machine runtime for what would become Java, told The Register, “I was one of the last people hired before the whole thing fell apart.” It wouldn’t be the last time Java outlived its detractors. Java chronicled If the idea of a professionally produced documentary about a programming language sounds familiar, then you’ve probably seen the ones on C++, Python or React. These were the work of tech job site Honeypot.io, which funded the documentaries to build a user base. In 2019, Honeypot was acquired by XING (which rebranded as New Work SE). However, founder Emma Tracey was more interested in the documentary side of things and bought the production shop back from New Work, reuniting the original gang and rebranding their efforts as Cult.Repo (short for Culture Repository). The Java Story is the first product of the newly liberated media company. The documentary features many of Java’s prime movers, including creator James Gosling and senior Oracle Java architects Mark Reinhold and Brian Goetz. While it may have taken a Hollywood-style effort to construct a Hero’s Journey around the plodding progress of Python, Java is a veritable Love Island of dramas, some of which were this documentary captured. The project that almost wasn’t Lindholm strayed into the computing field only as a result of the brutally cold winter of Minnesota, where he was living in a tent. He realized he would need someplace warmer and so scored an internship at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. There, he gained early experience with virtual machines thanks to the lab’s use of Prolog. His goal was not to be a programmer, but a mathematician. “Computer science was for people who couldn't be real mathematicians,” he said. But he learned the craft of implementing Prolog. “I learned to write to very high-quality virtual machines with things like garbage collection and embeddability,” he said. The VM experience led him to subsequent jobs at Xerox PARC and eventually Sun. When Lindholm arrived 1994, it was to work for an experimental “spin-in” subsidiary called FirstPerson. At the time, Sun made bank selling high-end workstations to engineers, but it wanted to build software for devices outside the typical workstation and PC market. FirstPerson’s chief concern was a bid from Time Warner to provide the interactive video-on-demand…