Java made it possible for average engineers to turn out relatively reliable applications, in a fraction of the time it'd have taken them with any other option (apart from Smalltalk but it was already niche by then).
Wouldn't this be Lisp?
Some of its design choices have fallen out of favour in recent times—I still disagree with their elision of unsigned integers—but they're generally at least defensible.
Java took off because it offered developers a path out of serfdom to Microsoft, at a time before the smartphone era somewhat reduced their market power. Once it had enough users to benefit from network effects, its future was assured. It took Sun putting billions of dollars into promoting and supporting it to get there.
Sun's commitment to Java probably killed the company, in the end.
There were better-designed languages at the time, and there have been plenty of much better-designed languages since, that have or will fail to displace it. Rust might be counted among these.
Can you give some examples of parts that are not well designed?
> And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?
* https://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/...
A follow-up noted:
> Yes! Java broke C++'s monopoly, and now C# is breaking Java's, and this sequence of broken monopolies dispelled the belief that have to use "the standard language", and now I code in Python for a living.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele_Jr%2e
Steele is/was well-acquainted with the bad parts of Java—he helped design Scheme after all. But in the alternative timeline where Java was not created, Java (and other machine-independent runtimes) would have not have become popular, and everyone would still be statically compiling C++.
I don’t know if that’s actually true. Computers were getting more and more powerful in the 90s, and hence more capable of supporting memory-managed and dynamic languages. Had Java not existed, I think that there’d be a very good change that Smalltalk or Lisp would have taken off instead. Indeed, looking at the late 90s, I think that there’s a good chance that the world would have gone with Smalltalk, and the computing industry would actually be light years ahead of where we are now.
