Heh. I remember the Java 1.0 days. At work someone showed me Java and just running a "Hello World" took a few seconds to start. And complex code was sloooow.

I immediately concluded that no-one will ever use it and that's it's just a fad. (Just like I predicted there's no way to make money from a search engine :) ).

Things changed a lot with Java 1.3, which, for the first time, came with JIT compiler.

And with modern escape analysis, lock elision, new GCs, etc, I no longer (OK very rarely) look to C/C++ for performance anymore.

I still miss real pointers (better unsafe, et al), native types collections (there are external ones) and more control over what gets put on the stack vs. on the heap (escape analysis is not good enough, yet.) sometimes.