Yes I know it's cliche at this point to mention it. And yes it could've had some unknown negative butterfly effect type of thing, but man I really would have loved to have seen where things would be now if Sun hadn't influenced this.
I was thinking about this recently in a completely different context. Java itself is actually not a bad language for what it tries to be: an easier to use ("safer") C++. It makes for a better "object oriented C" than C++ or Objective-C did.
Everywhere it really went wrong was when Sun got involved. J2EE, and especially EJB, was a complete waste and continues to create problems to this day - the awful but inescapable Spring "framework" was actually a replacement for the equally awful EJB architecture and creates the same bloat but without the licensing costs.
Java is a Sun product in the first place; i'm misunderstanding what you mean.
Unfortunately following an incident with a broken Lisp machine, a liquid lunch, and an unlicensed particle accelerator, I became trapped in a parallel universe where the HTML ERB anointed CSS by mistake during a drunken night out in Oslo.
The fundamental concept of CSS (best revealed by H.W.Lie's thesis IMO¹) was to create a rich and versatile and non-Turing-complete set of structural selectors in lieu of DSSSL's recursive logic, and to allow styles to overlay one another; two design choices that only by the application of gallons of irony can explain why most web pages are composed of a bunch of nested DIV elements with hashed IDs, overburdened class attributes, and assets compiled into static files.
Mostly though you're upset because respectable computer scientists didn't get invited to those sorts of parties.
"We'll have one style for the browser and one for printing!" - but turns out that nobody really gives a crap about printing, and when they do they want stuff printed exactly like it looks on screen.
"Forget tables, we'll have stuff floating around the screen!" - but turns out that there are more requirements for positioning rules that can be contained in anyone's philosophy.
Etc etc...
“The Web That Never Was”: https://youtu.be/8JOD1AQGqEg
I've thought about something similar, but for hardware--what if some early hardware design choices had went in a different way?
For example consider cathode ray tube (CRT) displays. A different choice by the CRT pioneers and we might have ended up with CRTs that scan outward in a spiral from the center, instead of scanning in a series of stacked left to right rows.
That would make bit mapped displays a lot more complicated. God help the programmer who has to write BITBLT for a spiral scan display.
I've written some Lisp and I don't find the syntax hard to read, so much as my unfamiliarity with the language itself (what does cons do? What kind of args does it take?).
Plus the occasional cluster migraine when I decide to write a macro, knowing that I'm lucky when regular code runs right the first time. Not really a fault of Lisp, I'm sure me trying to write C++ templates would end about the same.
Er, my experience is that Lisp or Scheme is taught in literally every CS course out there. Not high-school maybe, but then again in high-school you typically don't get Java either - maybe Scratch, maybe Python.
I know on HN it's fashionable to be pro-LISP, but "it's not taught" is not one of the reasons LISP is not popular.
I've worked with more people that know Haskell than Lisp (though that seems like an outlier, I would guess Lisp/Scheme is still more popular than Haskell).
It's totally possible that I'm an outlier or that it's regional, but I haven't seen any indication that Lisp is commonly known.
For example, CoffeeScript was everywhere about 10 years ago. If someone had told me then that in 5 years it would be dead, and in 10 years new devs would not have even heard of it, I wouldn’t have believed it. CoffeesScript died largely because JS adopted most of the innovations Coffee brought to the table in ES2015/ES6, thus Coffee became unnecessary.
Still, JS has come a long way in the past 10 years, which is impressive. When I need to write JS, I’m glad the days when I needed to use Underscore just to get map, reduce, etc. are long gone.
But regardless of the historical reasons, JavaScript is now an extremely popular programming language for non-web applications.
Lisp-style programming with s-expressions is just not very popular. Pure (or "pure-ish") functional programming in general just isn't.
I know some people really like functional programming and/or scheme, but the reality of the matter is that this never has been (and I suspect never will be) a mainstream opinion.
Functional programming is the Black Metal of programming. It's great and all, but will always be for a relatively small and niche audience.
And that's okay. Not everything needs to be large.
Semantic markup languages were niche until the web happened. Objective-C was a weird niche language until the iPhone app boom. People learn the languages they need to learn.
https://archive.apache.org/dist/
While I have never been a Java fan, it is so ubiquitous that time spent learning it will never be wasted time.
Or maybe Flash with ActionScript would have won. ;)
Was a good stab at things too but went nowhere sadly.
We might have had web assembly earlier