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Surely Basic is not responsible for the Commodore being responsive. Java was a total dog on phones for a long time, too.

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Well C wasn't responsible for the Commodore either. And whether Java was a dog or not, thats what people went with, from your SIM card to JavaME snake games to Dalvik/ART. People looked at these resource constrained environments and went "yeah lets use Java".

ETA: it's probably worth put scare quotes around "resource constrained" when talking about Android and IOS but phones were dreta's example.

and promptly went out of business when the iPhone showed up

a phone that launched full of ObjC and Javascript with a SIM card running Java...

ObjC is a native language and a direct descendent of C, and powered the phone's built-in apps. JS was provided for 3rd party developers, who incidentally rejected it. I wasn't aware of the SIM card running Java. I guess Java was good enough for that job since I never noticed any performance issues with the iPhone, unlike my Palm Pre which was plagued with them, and had a terrible battery life.

I still remember the load times for Last Ninja - I'd prefer an ssd any day.

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