The whole thing strikes me as some kind of weird ad hominem attack on an anthropomorphised foe, with an out of "but I don't know Java, so what do I know" (I'm o

The whole thing strikes me as some kind of weird ad hominem attack on an anthropomorphised foe, with an out of "but I don't know Java, so what do I know" (I'm only Paul fucking Graham). He says "No one loves it. C, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and Lisp programmers love their languages. I've never heard anyone say that they loved Java.". Putting aside the objection that loving Perl is a clear sign of mental illness (ducks) I'm sure that back in 2001 I absolutely loved Java and still do to a degree, though Clojure has taken the top spot. Being a Lisp guy, PG doesn't understand why Java mattered back in 2001. Quite simply, because the alternative was C++, or, heaven help us, C. Where I was working, we were doing cross-platform C++, with GUIs, and Java was a godsend. Java showed that you could get portable GUIs with performance in the right ballpark without all the incidental complexity of complex build toolchains and manual memory management. A whole slew of errors caused by manual memory management went away. No more corrupted heaps because someone in your team had a brain fart. No more segfaults and a blank screen where your running app used to be. Graham asserts that Java being a simpler C++ was a downside, but out in the real world where your teammates are fallible, Java let you get things done without requiring perfection. People who hate on Java lack context.