- Java is a general purpose programming language, much like Python or JavaScript.
- The language itself is specifically an object oriented programming language, so bears similarities to C++, C#.
- Java is also a platform, which means that Java code can run on any machine that has a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) on it. Originally those two things were interchangeable, and the only thing that ran on the JVM was Java. But since that time, a number of languages have been written which can run on the Java platform, languages like Scala, Groovy, an implementation of Ruby called jRuby, and an implementation of Python called Jython.