Which Silicon Valley company created the Java programming language?

Sun Microsystems created the Java programming language.

Java grew out of an internal Sun project that began in the early 1990s. James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton worked on a language for interactive television and other consumer devices. The project first used the name Oak, inspired by a tree outside Gosling’s office, before Sun renamed it Java after trademark concerns.

The team designed Java as a relatively portable, object-oriented language with a virtual machine. Programs could be compiled into bytecode and run on different systems, inspiring Sun’s famous “write once, run anywhere” promise. Java’s first public release came in 1995, and web browsers soon supported Java applets.

People sometimes credit only Gosling, who was the language’s principal designer, but Java was developed by a broader Sun team. Another common confusion is Oracle: Oracle now stewards major Java implementations because it acquired Sun, but Oracle did not create Java. Java’s later importance expanded well beyond browsers into enterprise servers, Android-era software ecosystems, and other large-scale applications.