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Comment by dontbeabill | Hacker News Reader

Gates claims now (and then) the Government will stifle innovation, yet when innovation came in the form of Java, the first thing Gates did (as proven by evidence) was to seek a way to destroy it. (because he was a man-child annoyed because he didn’t invent it, and couldn’t find a way to compete honestly). So he did what big bully’s do, he crushed Sun and got all his big boy friends to help.

What a inspiration.

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>Gates claims now (and then) the Government will stifle innovation,

"Innovation" when used by Gates in this context means "profits."

And I think Bill's dislike for Java was only because it was a threat to the Windows OS monopoly. The appeal of Java, as I recall, was that you could run the same application on multiple platforms.

I dont think it was just being man- child. It was being businessman in competition.

Bullies do well in business.

Java was never a form of innovation.

Java was very innovative at the time, with byte code and JIT, a more clear OO design relative to C++, embeddable safetly sandboxed web apps, memory safety in a "professional" language, cross platform binaries (in a non scripting language) etc.

The mid 90's was a long time ago. What was exciting then is not exciting now.

Everything that you mentioned was already available at the time in other languages. This is not innovation.

But to what extent was it available in a polished package?

For example, everything in rust was available in other languages, i would still say it was innovative because it brought all that together into a polished package that made the right tradeoffs for mainstream usage.

Java? Polished?

> But to what extent was it available in a polished package?

To a large extent. Both Smalltalk and Erlang were mature at that point in time.

> everything in rust was available in other languages

I am not doubting you but are you aware of any other language with affine types? I am not.

What is the single language that had all these features?

Smalltalk and Erlang for everything except the "webapps" part. For that there was flash.

OK. Java did all of it, including the web apps.

Yes, we know that.

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