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 tha

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.