Not too long after the introduction of Java in late 1995, Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy described Java as follows:
Java is just a small, simple, safe, object-oriented, interpreted or dynamically optimized, byte-coded, architecture-neutral, garbage-collected, multithreaded programming language with a strongly typed exception-handling mechanism for writing distributed, dynamically extensible programs.
Keep in mind that this summary mentions practically every major benefit of Java.