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Comment by npalli | Hacker News Reader

How do you explain Java's massive uptake. It can't be it that it solved some problem uniquely that no other language did (whatever that was in 1995). Without the massive marketing and development by Sun, IBM and Oracle who wanted to use it to undermine the windows platform I doubt Java would have taken off the manner it has.

Same thing with C and C++. Without AT&T's backing of Unix and C it is highly unlikely C would have ended up where it is right now. The initial backing of C++ by AT&T was certainly instrumental in pushing it forward.

Similar examples Python -- interesting niche language until Google picked it up and started pushing it around 2004.

FORTRAN -- IBM's muscle

C# -- doesn't solve anything that Java or C++ couldn't do in 2000 except Microsoft wanted their own proprietary language.

It seems that solving some problem might be optional, but commerical backing and long term support is essential.

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Java set out to solve two problems, one was portability of 'compiled' code, so OS/ISA independence, and the other was security issues. And Sun was actually in the process of flushing it down the toilet prior to the response it got in Darmdstadt and elsewhere. The big marketing push came when Sun saw it as a way to club Microsoft, that occurred only after people figured that 'life in the browser' didn't care what OS you ran on. And a lot of people wanted to get out from under Microsoft's thumb at the time.

"It seems that solving some problem might be optional, but commerical backing and long term support is essential."

It seems Forth might be a counter example here, what are your thoughts on its relative success?

Very few people/projects use Forth…

But, I can think of one or two way more popular and significant counterexamples (although I don't disagree with his general sentiment): Perl and Ruby.

The Java infrastructure one of its great strengths. I really do believe the way it evolved into something that System Admins and (to a lesser extent) DBAs could live with did it quite a lot of good in adoption. I really do believe it was independent of the actual language syntax.

these type of things: I put the war and the server and run some scripts. I deploy more app servers.

Having lived through it, the problem that Java uniquely solved in the '90s was that software companiesn had fallen in love with OO but C++ was too complicated for developers to use safely, with pointers vs. references problems, operator overloading (IIRC, the Zapp framework overloaded ++ to add items to a menu), and lack of garbage collection. Java was a breath of fresh air, a language sweet spot with most of C++'s power and few of its drawbacks.

well FORTRAN was designed for technical programming so its not just IBM's muscle.

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