Ask yourself: What other language could those enterprise projects have used? Of course there's the whole C/C++ world, but people were starting to realize that

Ask yourself: What other language could those enterprise projects have used? Of course there's the whole C/C++ world, but people were starting to realize that managing memory can be a pain, and that text-based preprocessors can be a pain too. In comparison, Java seemed easier. Fortran was known to be good for numerical applications, but had a bad reputation for everything else. Pascal? COBOL? really?? (Actually I don't know why people didn't consider Pascal more seriously; maybe it lacked corporate backing?) Of course there were scripting languages, but big corps are conservative, so it had to be statically type-checked. Many other languages came later, or weren't seen as mature enough back then (C#, Haskell). Java, OTOH, had a few pluses: static typing, OO, easy to learn (because it was a small language, and had similar syntax to C/C++), and a very well-documented standard library.