Origins: Java

I came across an interesting (though mostly off-topic) tidbit this morning while reading David Landes’ very excellent The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, regarding the island of Java, and the meaning that its name has taken in popular speech. Java, as you probably all know, is an island in the Indonesian archipelago, which has become so known for its coffee exports over the centuries that the word “java” has practically become synonymous with the beverage. The interesting thing is that coffee trees aren’t even native to Java, and were actually brought over by the Dutch colonizers from Ethiopia in the 17th century (originally called “Mocha,” after a seaport).

Now, try to imagine what the world would be like if the Dutch had decided to grow the coffee somewhere else, like say, Ceylon (which is where they had instead chosen to grow cinammon). Assuming Ceylon enjoyed a similar success in growing the coffee trees, it stands to reason that the word “Ceylon” would take the place of the word “Java” as being the de facto coffee source.

Now extend that thinking even further, about three centuries down the road to the year 1991, right around the time James Gosling at Sun Microsystems was hard at work developing a “virtual machine” that would allow the same code to be run on practically any platform or operating system. Codenamed “Oak,” this virtual machine had some trouble getting a good name, and the development team compiled a list of 20 decent ones, with one of the top choices being inspired by the kind of coffee they were always drinking at the office. Eventually that virtual machine became so popular that it is now currently deployed on about 2.5 billion devices, and enjoys one of the biggest development communities in the world.

Yes, I’m talking about Java, but the point is that “Java” the programming language could very well have been named “Ceylon” if the Dutch had made slightly different choices 300 years ago.

Hell, we might even be developing our mobile applications with C2ME, writing our DHTML with Ceylonscript, or building interfaces with ACAX. Positively mind-boggling, isn’t it?