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Java was not considered easy to understand back in 1997. There were cries about it being "too object-oriented". Developers were mostly used to procedural coding

by bpyne 16y ago

Java was not considered easy to understand back in 1997. There were cries about it being "too object-oriented". Developers were mostly used to procedural coding at the time. Thanks to hundreds of OO and Java books, along with the internet, developers came to see OO as a standard way of developing - Java benefited from that paradigm shift. (Good marketing helped as well.) We are entering another paradigm shift into functional programming. People are complaining about Scala's complexity but they are really more mystified by FP. Given time and lots of code sharing, FP and its representative languages will seem absolutely normal.

kaffiene 16y ago
That's absolutely not true. I was a C/C++ programmer at the time that Java came out and I remember all the hype being about Java being easy / quick to develop with. There were a tonne of studies out about how much more productive Java projects were compared to C/C++ projects. BTW I do not believe that we are seeing a paradigm shift to functional programming. Only inside HN's echo-chamber could you believe that. I do think that some ideas from FP are becoming more mainstream, such as closures, but what we are going to see is a cherry picking of the better features. I don't believe concepts like currying or monads are going to become popular any time soon.