I agree, my first reaction on seeing the title was "Underhyped? Really? You must be joking." The reason Java can be a nice language/runtime today is the sheer

I agree, my first reaction on seeing the title was "Underhyped? Really? You must be joking." The reason Java can be a nice language/runtime today is the sheer amount of resources available to be poured on it due to all the hype in the 90s. It was supposed to save us from all the effort porting our software to many operating systems and processor architectures (the computing world was much less homogeneous back then). It was supposed to run everywhere without modification, from the smallest smartcard to the biggest mainframe. It was supposed to not only run within our web browser, but also be the implementation language of our web browser, or even the whole operating system. It was supposed to magically be faster than even C and C++ (those who used Java back then can recall how slow it was; for instance, hanging the whole browser for a whole minute while the JVM started up was not uncommon). Everything was supposed be written in Java; it was not good enough to call a native library for whatever functionality you wanted, it had to be rewritten in pure Java. Java was a mediocre language. All that hype led to a virtuous cycle, which allowed it to grow into what it is today.