But it isn't necessarily there strictly on the merits of the language. Sun put a billion dollars of marketing into it. Managers, directors and others with expectation of ever programming were taking Java courses because it was going to change everything.

It was going to run on every device in my kitchen, and they were all going to talk to each other. Instead the first niche it found was J2EE, and that "write once, run anywhere" was a bit comical, because who swaps out the OS on their server?

It was apparently good enough to be the choice for Android and similar, but that was much later.

It's really difficult to describe how people -- especially non programmers -- bought into the hype surrounding Java.

I've since seen a bit of that hype around some things, but never to that extent: XML, SPA, a strange obsession with tiled widgets.