I don't get where you get the two decades from. Oracle acquired Sun in 2012. The model for Java was Smalltalk, but in Smalltalk everything was an object => dif

I don't get where you get the two decades from. Oracle acquired Sun in 2012. The model for Java was Smalltalk, but in Smalltalk everything was an object => difficult to optimize. Primitive types were introduced in Java to optimize computation with those basic datatypes. The state of things was fine, until Generics were introduced. Generics preserved backwards compatibility, but widened the division between object and primitive types. This division was fine, until it started to matter that Java can't be used for high-performance applications. For enterprise application, this gap has never really mattered.