Slight nitpick: I would have said "20 years ago" about garbage collection. As soon as Java came out, full GC (vs ref count) somehow became OK. Disclaimer: Ja

Slight nitpick: I would have said "20 years ago" about garbage collection. As soon as Java came out, full GC (vs ref count) somehow became OK. Disclaimer: Java programmers get jobs, so I am one. My feeling about it is "The elegance of C++ at the speed of a Lisp". Fortunately, we are starting to get better language front ends which can reuse the old JVM binaries, as well as having a GC-ing VM that has had decades and $millions thrown at it.