Well that’s a more specific criticism - that AWT sucked. I won’t defend Java GUIs from the period having worked on a 1990s Java AWT based GUI application. Alt

Well that’s a more specific criticism - that AWT sucked. I won’t defend Java GUIs from the period having worked on a 1990s Java AWT based GUI application. Although, SWT apps like eclipse were decent enough. I think in the context of the time, Java was simply following the common least-common-denominator approach, common for cross-platform GUI toolkits at the time - tcl/tk was hot at the time as were commercial products like powerbuilder. This approach was to only include features/funtionality which mapped directly to native for all supported platforms - Mac, windows and some X11 toolkit. There were convincing arguments for this approach at the time - you got native look and behavior from the same code for all platforms Java ran on, like with TK but it quickly came apparent that this approach was a technological cul-de-sac limited to simple dialogs and form-based GUIs.