Why is Java labeled as a "secure" language?

Question

I guess this is a general question, but I am going through introductory courses to java (SE/ME) and the study material claims that java is often used for "security purposes". It does not explain however what they mean by claiming that java incorporates good security.

Is it hacker proof? Does it produce highly stable software? What?

Security from my point of view (at the moment) is that it's in the hands of the developer writing the code, not the language itself?

Answer 1

IMHO, that's a very misleading statement. In Java, you cannot access out-of-bound arrays, and you don't have pointers, and thus several security flaws like stack corruption or buffer overflow is impossible to exploit in Java. But Java is not inherently more secure than any other language; it's just there is less chance to make mistakes that can cause security flaws. In effect, this reduces security flaws, but it's totally misleading to say Java is secure.