作者彙整: Peter Wayner

It’s been a long trip for Java, a language that began as the lingua franca for the box on top of the television set in the days when TVs didn’t come with Roku or Chromecast built-in. Then Java was going to own the World Wide Web by animating the browser before JavaScript came along and elbowed it out of the way.

Java ended up finding a niche in the server farms where there were once enough different chip architectures and operating systems to make the “write once run anywhere promise” compelling. And in those server farms Java has lived on, a favorite of enterprise IT shops addicted to reliability and developers with a love of strong typing.

In the meantime, JavaScript in general and Node.js in particular have challenged Java on the server, using their high throughput and thread-free speed to take over a huge chunk of the traffic on the web. Node has captured the imagination of the newest server-side programmers by offering not only speed and resource efficiency but also the simplicity of code that runs on both the client and the server.

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When a team of Google coders looked out across the collection of computer languages in 2007, they saw hundreds of perfectly good tools for writing software but none that offered the right features for Google. That is, a language that supported building the Google vision of a galaxy of software packages working together in Google’s vast collection of servers.

Some languages were too focused on the lowest bit-banging levels of the stack. Others were too complex, larded with features that would only get in the way. The Google developers wanted a language that was simple enough to be learned in a few hours but just complex enough to handle the flow of information across the modern Internet.

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