Why? You're right that Java was a reaction to C++, and in that view it was a rather simple language. Virtual machines and garbage collection were indeed new (we

Why? You're right that Java was a reaction to C++, and in that view it was a rather simple language. Virtual machines and garbage collection were indeed new (well, new for C-like languages. actually, new for c++), but one was necessary in order to make java embeddable (which was one of its primary goals initially), and the second was a very necessary solution to too many years of malloc. But the essential point is that after HelloWorld a C/C++ programmer with a JavaDoc can pretty much start churning code. The immediate consequences, way before getting to esoteric disputes about single/multiple inheritance, were only positive: the code was portable, memory problems disappeared, the documentation was in one place, the library was standard etc. The language itself, for the ordinary programmer of the time, was just simplified C++.