4 ms·

This is a myth, perpetuated probably by people that weren't around in those days. It is true that Sun pumped money into marketing, but given that other companie

This is a myth, perpetuated probably by people that weren't around in those days. It is true that Sun pumped money into marketing, but given that other companies did the same without the same success, most notably Microsoft, it's proof enough that pumping money in marketing isn't everything. Java succeeded because (1) targeting Unix and multi-platform development was awful, the closest thing to an alternative to C/C++ was Perl, (2) people loved in-browser applets and this was the killer feature and (3) all decent alternatives were expensive. I remember in college when I decided to build a simple desktop app for Windows and I chose Java because I didn't have money for Borland's Delphi or for Visual Basic and I hated the thought of pirating like everybody else did it. > From a developer standpoint Go is superior, but would the same political support happen for a Google-invented language? Personally I don't think that Go is in any way superior, quite the contrary, I think it represents a regression and it wouldn't be on anybody's radar if Google wasn't involved.

waps 12y ago
> but given that other companies did the same without the same success, most notably Microsoft Microsoft failed to see what was coming when IBM/Sun/Oracle pushed java, true. But go back to a bank department today and take a look. C# everywhere.
- bad_user 12y ago
  It depends on where you're looking. In my country banking is dominated by Java and I've seen mixtures too and migrations from C# to Java. .NET has several problems. Microsoft targeted Windows while Java's rise is correlated with the rise of Linux on the server-side. Linux on the server-side is cheap and reliable and people want more and more Linux and Microsoft's cooperation with Xamarin is kind of too late and is meant for mobile phones and not Linux, but who knows. Microsoft also failed to create an open-source community around .NET, while Java's open-source ecosystem is huge and even the commercial tools available are cheaper. Microsoft advertised .NET as being multi-language but dropped the ball later and failed to attract new languages, whereas other languages are flourishing on top of the JVM, keeping Java the platform hip. Microsoft also failed to convince startups to use .NET and today's startups are tomorrow's corporations.

waps 12y ago

> but given that other companies did the same without the same success, most notably Microsoft Microsoft failed to see what was coming when IBM/Sun/Oracle pushed java, true. But go back to a bank department today and take a look. C# everywhere.

bad_user 12y ago
It depends on where you're looking. In my country banking is dominated by Java and I've seen mixtures too and migrations from C# to Java. .NET has several problems. Microsoft targeted Windows while Java's rise is correlated with the rise of Linux on the server-side. Linux on the server-side is cheap and reliable and people want more and more Linux and Microsoft's cooperation with Xamarin is kind of too late and is meant for mobile phones and not Linux, but who knows. Microsoft also failed to create an open-source community around .NET, while Java's open-source ecosystem is huge and even the commercial tools available are cheaper. Microsoft advertised .NET as being multi-language but dropped the ball later and failed to attract new languages, whereas other languages are flourishing on top of the JVM, keeping Java the platform hip. Microsoft also failed to convince startups to use .NET and today's startups are tomorrow's corporations.