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How did Sun manage to get so much hype around Java? There can't be many things in tech which have had that kind of PR achievement, especially if you move away

How did Sun manage to get so much hype around Java? There can't be many things in tech which have had that kind of PR achievement, especially if you move away from flashy user-facing things like iPhones and Playstations.

phendrenad2 5y ago
100% of the hype around Java was that it was "write once, run anywhere". That was the marketing slogan for it, after all. And remember, in the 90s cross-platform was HARD. We had Windows NT, Windows 98, Mac OS, Linux, Unix, big endian, little endian, weird filesystems (resource fork, anyone?). gcc wasn't even cross-platform, so good luck cross-compiling things. You had to somehow write one C++ codebase that would compile in Metrowerks CodeWarrior, MS Visual Studio, GCC, and across different endian CPUs, or compilers with different definitions for int and long. Plus, the standard libraries for these systems were radically different. No one even tried to solve this problem until Java came along and made it performant through bytecode JIT.
robterrell 5y ago
One way was Java applets. Back in the mid-nineties, applets were the only way to make web pages meaningfully flashy and interactive. They pioneered the space later conquered by Flash.
clusterhacks 5y ago
Java and its compiler were free and easy to install into CS department labs. There was a huge hype train around object-oriented development being the way that somewhat continues to this day. OO was all the rage along with the "Design Patterns" book. OO hype in the enterprise also seemed to drive CS departments to use Java for just about all classes because it was "pragmatic" and a "real" job skill to give students. I mainly remember being excited about garbage collection.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
I think part of it was that Java promised Unix-y/open systems to stay around when in 1995 it seemed like Windows would dominate server-side programming, in addition to the desktop.
pjc50 5y ago
As sibling says: applets. They were there from launch, and they offered the never-before-seen combination of "write once, run anywhere" and zero-installation and sandboxed code. They were kind of clunky, but anyone who had the responsibility of managing a client-server app across a fleet of PCs would have had a lightbulb go on over their head on seeing that. The university hype seems to have been real as well; I was being taught Java in late 1997, when it had only launched in 1996 and was maybe on version 1.1? Previous years were taught object orientation through Modula-3, and you really don't see a lot of that these days. Java offers the decisive advantage of braces rather than BEGIN..END.
renox 5y ago
Lots of marketing backed by lots of money.. I remember trying to use Java in the Java2 days when every magazine would tell you how it's great, but the reality was that I was wasting a lot of time working around bugs in the Java libraries (and once even a bug in the JVM itself).
rsynnott 5y ago
Java had a combination of things that made it really interesting at the time; the tooling was free, it had automatic memory management, it had easily distributable apps, it had some sort of multi-platform UI (even if it wasn't very good). Nothing else at the time really satisfied all of that. It also had problems, of course (in particular, it was very slow at first, and Java 1.0 had a lot of weird baggage that got fixed, too late, in 1.1 and hung around for years), but it really was something interesting at the time.
foldr 5y ago
Others have mentioned that the tooling was free, but I think younger folks might easily underestimate how big of a factor this was. In 2000 I was blown away that I could download NetBeans for free and learn the language just by reading free documentation on Sun’s website. Yes, there were already free languages that had significant mindshare (e.g. Perl), but Java was backed by a big name company and came with pretty sophisticated GUI and networking libraries baked in. Perl was associated with ‘scripting’, whereas Java was marketed as a serious language for writing serious applications. Compared to the free C++ dev environments available at the time it was mind blowing.
mwattsun 5y ago
Richard Feldman (Elm) analyzes why programming languages become popular and says Java is unique. It became popular because Sun spent 100's of millions of dollars promoting it, even after the dot com crash. Others like Ruby, had a killer app. His thesis is object oriented programming wasn't inevitable or is the best way to program. It was an accident of history that OOP became so popular. Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? – Richard Feldman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4 Another Java tidbit is that Miguel de Icaza (Gnome, Mono) really wanted an open source higher level language on Linux so he approached Sun about Java and they wouldn't work with him, so he settled on C# and is probably the man most responsible for the move to cross platform C# and .NET (dotnetcore, v5) https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/May-11.html https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/May-11.html

phendrenad2 5y ago

100% of the hype around Java was that it was "write once, run anywhere". That was the marketing slogan for it, after all. And remember, in the 90s cross-platform was HARD. We had Windows NT, Windows 98, Mac OS, Linux, Unix, big endian, little endian, weird filesystems (resource fork, anyone?). gcc wasn't even cross-platform, so good luck cross-compiling things. You had to somehow write one C++ codebase that would compile in Metrowerks CodeWarrior, MS Visual Studio, GCC, and across different endian CPUs, or compilers with different definitions for int and long. Plus, the standard libraries for these systems were radically different. No one even tried to solve this problem until Java came along and made it performant through bytecode JIT.

robterrell 5y ago

One way was Java applets. Back in the mid-nineties, applets were the only way to make web pages meaningfully flashy and interactive. They pioneered the space later conquered by Flash.

clusterhacks 5y ago

Java and its compiler were free and easy to install into CS department labs. There was a huge hype train around object-oriented development being the way that somewhat continues to this day. OO was all the rage along with the "Design Patterns" book. OO hype in the enterprise also seemed to drive CS departments to use Java for just about all classes because it was "pragmatic" and a "real" job skill to give students. I mainly remember being excited about garbage collection.

tannhaeuser 5y ago

I think part of it was that Java promised Unix-y/open systems to stay around when in 1995 it seemed like Windows would dominate server-side programming, in addition to the desktop.

pjc50 5y ago

As sibling says: applets. They were there from launch, and they offered the never-before-seen combination of "write once, run anywhere" and zero-installation and sandboxed code. They were kind of clunky, but anyone who had the responsibility of managing a client-server app across a fleet of PCs would have had a lightbulb go on over their head on seeing that. The university hype seems to have been real as well; I was being taught Java in late 1997, when it had only launched in 1996 and was maybe on version 1.1? Previous years were taught object orientation through Modula-3, and you really don't see a lot of that these days. Java offers the decisive advantage of braces rather than BEGIN..END.

renox 5y ago

Lots of marketing backed by lots of money.. I remember trying to use Java in the Java2 days when every magazine would tell you how it's great, but the reality was that I was wasting a lot of time working around bugs in the Java libraries (and once even a bug in the JVM itself).

rsynnott 5y ago

Java had a combination of things that made it really interesting at the time; the tooling was free, it had automatic memory management, it had easily distributable apps, it had some sort of multi-platform UI (even if it wasn't very good). Nothing else at the time really satisfied all of that. It also had problems, of course (in particular, it was very slow at first, and Java 1.0 had a lot of weird baggage that got fixed, too late, in 1.1 and hung around for years), but it really was something interesting at the time.

foldr 5y ago

Others have mentioned that the tooling was free, but I think younger folks might easily underestimate how big of a factor this was. In 2000 I was blown away that I could download NetBeans for free and learn the language just by reading free documentation on Sun’s website. Yes, there were already free languages that had significant mindshare (e.g. Perl), but Java was backed by a big name company and came with pretty sophisticated GUI and networking libraries baked in. Perl was associated with ‘scripting’, whereas Java was marketed as a serious language for writing serious applications. Compared to the free C++ dev environments available at the time it was mind blowing.

mwattsun 5y ago

Richard Feldman (Elm) analyzes why programming languages become popular and says Java is unique. It became popular because Sun spent 100's of millions of dollars promoting it, even after the dot com crash. Others like Ruby, had a killer app. His thesis is object oriented programming wasn't inevitable or is the best way to program. It was an accident of history that OOP became so popular. Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? – Richard Feldman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4 Another Java tidbit is that Miguel de Icaza (Gnome, Mono) really wanted an open source higher level language on Linux so he approached Sun about Java and they wouldn't work with him, so he settled on C# and is probably the man most responsible for the move to cross platform C# and .NET (dotnetcore, v5) https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/May-11.html https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/May-11.html