> IMHO it's just a self fulfilling prophecy. Except C++ was once more popular than Java, as was Visual Basic. PHP was almost as popular and Ruby was on its way

> IMHO it's just a self fulfilling prophecy. Except C++ was once more popular than Java, as was Visual Basic. PHP was almost as popular and Ruby was on its way. Java is quite exceptional in how long it remained as popular as it has, so clearly popularity can't explain its own longevity. > viewing any of those as a valid reason for choosing to use/learn/teach Java implies favoring convenience over value. Well, the software market is under heavy selective economic pressure, so you'd expect things that actually provide value to spread rather quickly. Indeed, things like unit tests and GCs -- once they met a certain level of "production quality" --spread very quickly, and now it seems like various AI assistants could end up another such example. So if something doesn't spread quickly, it's fairly safe to assume that it doesn't really offer the value the market cares about. It's like the story of VHS and Betamax, where, at least according to the popular story, Betamax fans thought it was of superior technical quality because of its better picture, but VHS's technical superiority was in recording time, and ultimately the market saw more value in the latter than in the former. Java's evolution is being designed very carefully, and we at least try to select features that we think could offer real business value -- which also includes not just theoretical power, but the actual ability of most programmers to put a feature to good use -- and not to introduce features that we think are cool (or those that we feel like we're trying to rationalise their value). Of course, we don't always stick to that, but we try (popular languages are generally stingy with features because there's a pretty clear negative correlation between language "richness" and its success). You may think this is obvious, but designers of less popular languages often very much don't think like that at all.