You'll have to remember the time when it was created. The idea of "write once, run anywhere" was considered a huge net positive. It can run on your Big Iron, an

You'll have to remember the time when it was created. The idea of "write once, run anywhere" was considered a huge net positive. It can run on your Big Iron, and it can run on your watch. The fact that it was quickly adopted into education at the time led to it being used by many post grads. It's firmly entrenched in many enterprises due to Oracle (which perhaps rightly deserves a place in the enterprise) TELLING everyone "if you're serious about enterprise, if you're serious about scale, you'll use Java". This has led to the "no one has ever gotten fired for recommending we use Java" attitude in large corporations. While it was completely painful to use in the early days, it actually has gotten much better. But I'll agree, people were calling it "enterprise" when it was just a huge bloated XML nightmare.