I have been a Java developer since the JDK alpha in 1995. It was apparent then that Java was going to be pretty big due to the fact it was VM-based, addressed a

I have been a Java developer since the JDK alpha in 1995. It was apparent then that Java was going to be pretty big due to the fact it was VM-based, addressed a lot of pain points like platform independence/concurrency/interfaces/etc., and was similar enough to C/C++ that people would adapt to it quickly. The language experienced an enormous network effect due to the tooling and support libraries that allowed Java to become dominant in enterprise development. It's hard to argue that a feature that appeared a decade later changed the equation all that much. I like generics but would still use Java even if they did not exist. In my work the concurrency features are far more important.