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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

Alternatively one can consider that fast adoption driven by marketing isn't a sign of best quality. Take a look at Java.

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Java would be devoured by C# and others if it were that bad. I guess that it isn’t bad, at a pragmatic level. It definitely ain’t about developer joy though. When I first used it in 99 it seemed magical though. Notepad + javac = gui program. Compare that to VisualC++ or VB!

Once something gets entrenched, the tin soldier logic of bean counters will make it stick around for a long time.

It doesn't matter. Java is safe (thanks to it's GC) albeit having null pointer. Very few languages offered that guarantee.

Java is anything but low quality...

I wouldn't call it a best quality language design. And its adoption was driven by marketing for sure.

Must have been a bit more than marketing, sinceto Ms had to do first J++ then C# to counter its impact.

Java the language was the worst part of Java the technology stack for years. This has been changing but only very recently.

That's true, I suppose I am lumping the JVM and tooling in there with my defense.

I do like the verboseness, though, espectially for inheriting code.

or Java Script

Weird example. JS took a long time to take off, and had virtually no marketing budget.

Or is your point that JS took off despite that, and so maybe is high quality? I think that's wrong too.

JS name was based on Java. Pure marketing name.

Launched by Netscape with Sun approval (they used to own the trademark, now it is Oracle) in 95.

Netscape had money and marketshare.

It was adopted by competing browsers (IE in 96, Opera end of 97) and removed alternatives (perl, tcl, python in browsers (eg https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol2_3/tpj0203-0004.html ))

As for the quality of JS, there was a reason "JS the good parts" was popular.

JS was a quickly made (in 10 days). It showed.

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