The "dumb-proof" bit is from people that themselves are not strong in CS, typically... It's just snark as you say. There was incredible demand for something li

The "dumb-proof" bit is from people that themselves are not strong in CS, typically... It's just snark as you say. There was incredible demand for something like Java, gigantic efforts were put in to place to standardize the many different UNIX like OSes but apps were still incompatible. ANDF was an effort by the OpenGroup, I'm not aware of any real implementations of it. The big powers, save for MS, all wanted to build platforms where vendors could write applications that could run. Then along comes Java, it has all the modern bits in a language that people deemed needed at the time, there were plans for performance, it was fairly easy to implement a VM, it had a robust library, C-inspired syntax (Pascal vs C might have been the last big war before Java,) it had real binary compatibility. Sun, IBM, Oracle, just about every major company backed it, even MS sort of did. The performance got better, etc.. When the whole industry buys in to something, it'd have been amazing if it didn't get adopted. Then compared to C++ or C, the productivity gains were (and still are) staggering, GC and real stack traces are manna from the gods at the time. Fast-forward to now, it's still got top shelf managed language performance, the tooling is maybe only matched by MS's tools. The counter question I'd ask, what has come up lately that could possibly replace Java? There are some interesting JVM languages, the CS dork in me would love for Scala to take off more but not for any qualitative reason that I could point to to say it's really better; I'm a functional believer but I'd estimate that less than 3% of the code written in any language anywhere is functional. Rust and Go are neat, but if you look at the whole picture, I don't think there is anything close to providing what Java does that would justify replacing it; save for possibly .net but then you lose the compatibility which was one of the primary desires from the start. I'd think something would have to outdo java or the game would have to change pretty dramatically and enterprises would start needing different kinds of software and I don't see that happening any time soon. How many major technologies get replaced with nothing?