5 ms·

It’s crazy to think C++ and Java are only 10 years apart in the language timeline.

• forinti 6y ago
  I think it is weird that it is 5 years younger than Python. I only heard about Python much later.
  • hugs 6y ago
    Like in Aesop's fable, Python was a "tortoise" to many other languages "hare". Many languages (especially BASIC, Perl, PHP, Java, and Ruby) had moments where they had an extreme amount of attention in a short amount of time. Python never had its one defining "moment" (like Sun announcing and hyping Java), but Python steadily grew in usage nevertheless the whole time.
• usrusr 6y ago
  Well, both are far out on the fast end of the adoption rate spectrum, so subjectively those ten years have been a very long ten years. A lot of Java had been written to pre-1.5/"java 5" standards. There is so much of that stuff that even a full ten years after falling in love with Scala (not as an early adopter, I think it was right at its popularity peak!) I happened to find myself "generifying" some ancient java code. Even kotlin is older now than pre-generics Java has ever been.
  • formerly_proven 6y ago
    What fascinates me is that Java 1.0 is from 1996, yet it seems like there was already a large number of production systems based on it by the turn of the millennium.
    • hibikir 6y ago
      I worked on one, for a large telecom: It was simple business software, which before was written either in Cobol or plain old C. The large performance penalty that Java had back then was far less important than having to mind memory leaks in C, and people already thought Cobol was a language without a big future. It was also at the time before the dominance of x86 on intel hardware, so the compile once, run anywhere idea was also quite attractive to people that knew they wanted to change hardware vendors. It took a few more versions, and a few more JVM performance improvements, before Java was a competitive for a broader spectrum of uses, but it was competitive for business very quickly.
    • projektfu 6y ago
      Java 1.0 got people excited about applets, but Java 1.1 really got people going with server side. Microsoft joined in with Visual J++ and it was also obvious that it was going to be important on the Mac. (I couldn't get it to do anything useful on my IIcx, unfortunately.) Then, with the introduction of the HotSpot VM along with Java 1.2, it got really good. These days, we're spoiled with our wide variety of available, free languages, but at the time most software for Windows was written in Visual Basic, Pascal (Delphi), or C++, none of which was free. And Windows was almost all of the desktop PC market share. The promise of write-once-run-anywhere also made Java really interesting.
• yen223 6y ago
  I find it weirder that both Python and Haskell are older than Java
• oaiey 6y ago
  It was a golden age. C++, Python, Java, PHP, JavaScript, C#. Every language we use today with the exception of Rust and Go came from that time.
• eplanit 6y ago
  It was (partially) because of the evolution of C++ that Java became popular. C++ was starting to gain baggage by recent additions like double inheritance. Java was seen as a clean break from that, and back to a a more solid OO model.