The JVM and Garbage collector were good but were already present with Lisp and Smalltalk. I've been developing professionally since '94 and the first two years

The JVM and Garbage collector were good but were already present with Lisp and Smalltalk. I've been developing professionally since '94 and the first two years of my career were with C++. In '97 I had the opportunity to move to a green field project using Java. The most useful thing for young me was not the Garbage collector, it was no header files and Javadoc.