30 years of Java by Simone Bordet

30 years ago Java and the JVM appeared in the software development landscape, changing it forever by introducing concepts and features that we now give for granted but at time were an authentic revolution like: the removal of incidental complexities from previous languages like C++, such such as pointers, memory management, and explicit handling of low-level operations, the platform independence allowing to write and compile a program once and run it on any operating system or the native support for multithreading and distributed computing. Even more surprisingly Java kept innovating, release after release and year after year, adding more and more capabilities and characteristics like generics, lambdas, a module system, pattern matching and virtual threads without even breaking backward compatibility. You can take a program written 30 years ago for Java 1.0 and run it on the latest JVM and very likely it will still execute flawlessly and with the same outcome. In this talk we will shortly revise the history of Java, from its origin to the current state and beyond, with a quick glimpse on what we could expect in the near future.