> What is amazing to me is that Java could attract such a huge community Why is it amazing? Java was a well-compromised piece of PLT design, by a geek friendly

> What is amazing to me is that Java could attract such a huge community Why is it amazing? Java was a well-compromised piece of PLT design, by a geek friendly company known for its engineering chops, with a very cool (hackable!) VM that allowed for both compiletime and runtime magic, and all this over and above the fairly well equipped standard library. (Beyond that, concerted Java hype in late 90s was ~same as what we saw later with RoR, Scala, Go, and now apparently Rust. Java may not be cool these days but it was the shiny thing in late 90s.)