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Comment by futharkshill | Hacker News Reader

Why would you think Java is a descendant of C++? There may be overlap in some syntax, mainly from C. C++ is not, and was not, the only OOP language, and I have heard no such that that is should be descendant of C++.

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I was once at a talk given by James Gosling. He said that Java-the-language was «a trick to get C++ programmers to use the Java Virtual Machine». He deliberately made Java very similar to C++ but removed what he saw as the hard and risky parts (memory management, operator overloading, etc) that are typically not required for standard applications.

Well, that was my interpretation of what he said, errors are my own etc. But this would make Java a direct descendant of C++, in my mind.

I have never heard that quote from James before. Are you sure about the JVM? The JVM was quite controversial back then, Java first had to prove that you could make a performant virtual machine.

But Guy Steele claimed "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."

Well, it’s many years ago and memory corruption is real. I got the impression that their goal was to get adoption of (what at some point became) the JVM, or the «compile once run anywhere» vision. They envisioned many languages to coexist on the JVM, which kinda happened but maybe not as much as they thought. So they designed a language to get started, Java, and made it familiar-looking to get people om board.

I was around at the time.

Java's object semantics are explicitly intended as a streamlining of C++, the keywords are the same for the most part, and it was sold as a C++ which runs anywhere with no memory leaks.

Note that I mentioned the semantics: the object semantics of Java and C++ are so similar as to have corrupted the entire concept of objects in their favor.

This wasn't an accident, and it wasn't malice, it just feels like it sometimes.

I'm not a Java programmer but as far as I can tell java object semantics, far from being corrupted, do indeed come from simula via c++.

Thanks to reflection and a featureful VM, Java does have a significant amount of dynamic behaviour that can be used to implement a lot of features of the smalltalk side of the OO family tree.

Because at the time it was pretty clear.

'At that stage, C and C++ "absolutely owned the universe"' - https://www.zdnet.com/article/programming-languages-java-fou...

They took a lot of inspiration from C/C++'s syntax and seemed to be pretty concerned with improving memory management, security and developer velocity.

Another programming language being popular by no means mean that it is a derived language of any sort. Any development is of course retrospective, but it is sorta like saying all music is descendant from pop.

I understand the point you’re trying to make but writing music is a creative process whereas marketing programming languages isn’t.

I was around at the time and C++ was trendy so Sun were marketing it as the future for C++ developers. It was definitely influenced by what was in vogue at the time even if it doesn’t adopt all of the traits of C++.

I remember this because I wasn’t a fan of C++ back then as I’d come from the ALGOL family of languages so found C-style syntax a little alien (and tbh I still don’t like C++ now even though I’ve since warmed to C’s syntax) so it took me years before I warmed to Java.

Define "derived".

In particular, if Java kept (almost?) all the keywords, and the operators, and the statement terminators, and the block delimiters, and the same approach to object-oriented... how is it not derived from C++?

>C++ is not, and was not, the only OOP language

No, but it was the only one that mattered at the time, as far as adoption was concerned, and regarding marketing Java as similar to existing programmers and their managers...

That's also how it was hyped at the time and the kind of people it was sold too (I was -barely- there).

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