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Comment by galkk | Hacker News Reader

I hate to be that guy, but out of all language authors I think that Gosling is the least remarkable.

First versions of Java as a language really feel as a language, designed by a student with pretty maximalist opinions. No goto, no autoboxing, resistance to generics…

Even at a time it was created, it was nothing new.

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To be honest, that was its strength. It was brilliant largely for what it left out. I think it was largely successful as a language that superficially looked like C++ but without the sharp edges and foot guns. Also, it largely succeeded at being easy to learn, portable, memory safe, and reasonably secure. Once the HotSpot JIT was added, performance was actually quite good as well. The biggest issue Java had was that it never had a GUI toolkit that was pleasant for both developers and end users.

Yep - I switched from C/C++ to Java around 99 and compared to the pain of C++ it was an easy decision. There is a ton of business logic and line of business apps that Java was the default choice for a lot of years. If Swing had a more pleasant devx/deployment then we would be using Swing apps instead of electron.

Swing apps were also terrible for end users. The default “Metal” look and feel was just not very good, and the platform emulating ones were just uncanny valley. They never quite looked or felt right for the platform.

There are very few languages that have been nearly as successful. Adoption and deployment at that scale is pretty remarkable whatever you think of the design decisions.

I think its because of JVM hype (write once, run everywhere) and JDK depth, not because of Java as a language itself.

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