And more to the point for this thread, writing it in Java let Notch build and iterate extremely quickly. Minecraft originally came out of a 24 hour game writing

And more to the point for this thread, writing it in Java let Notch build and iterate extremely quickly. Minecraft originally came out of a 24 hour game writing competition in which most competitors were using C++, but Notch always used Java because coding speed was the most critical thing in that context.