Not sure why you were downvoted; it's a fair question. To understand the answer, you have to realize that idiomatic C++ has changed over the years. Back in the

Not sure why you were downvoted; it's a fair question. To understand the answer, you have to realize that idiomatic C++ has changed over the years. Back in the nineties, it still placed a lot of emphasis on object-oriented programming with inheritance, polymorphism - ah, even writing those words now brings back memories! - and explicit heap allocation, which in turn meant a lot of manual freeing of memory. So yes, Java had much of the same flavor except you didn't have to manually free memory or deal with five different string classes. It was an easy sell.