C - Developed circa 1970 at Bell Labs
COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) - uses terms like file, move and copy.
FORTRAN (Formula Translation) - using mathematical language terminology, it was developed mainly for scientific and engineering problems.
ALGOL (Algorithmic Language) - focused on being an appropriate language to define algorithms, while using mathematical language terminology and targeting scientific and engineering problems just like FORTRAN.
PL/I (Programming Language One) - a hybrid commercial/scientific general purpose language supporting pointers.
BASIC (Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) - was developed to enable more people to write programs.
All these languages follow the procedural paradigm. That is, they describe, step by step, exactly the procedure that should, according to the particular programmer at least, be followed to solve a specific problem. The efficacy and efficiency of any such solution are both therefore entirely subjective and highly dependent on that programmer's experience, inventiveness and ability.
Java platform
One characteristic of Java is portability, which means that computer programs written in the Java language must run similarly on any hardware/operating-system platform. This is achieved by compiling the Java language code to an intermediate representation called Java byte code, instead of directly to platform-specific machine code. Java byte code instructions are analogous to machine code, but are intended to be interpreted by a virtual machine (VM) written specifically for the host hardware. End-users commonly use a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed on their own machine for standalone Java applications, or in a Web browser for Java applets.
Standardized libraries provide a generic way to access host-specific features such as graphics, threading, and networking. A major benefit of using byte code is porting. However, the overhead of interpretation means that interpreted programs almost always run more slowly than programs compiled to native executables would. Just-in-Time (JIT) compilers were introduced from an early stage that compiles byte codes to machine code during runtime.