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Not at all. Java's rise was the perfect storm of several factors: object orientation taken to its logical conclusion during a huge IT hype period for it (much l

Not at all. Java's rise was the perfect storm of several factors: object orientation taken to its logical conclusion during a huge IT hype period for it (much like "Big Data" today), the tail end of a huge explosion of CPU architectures which made VMs very attractive, and CPU power finally getting to the point where pervasive garbage collection wasn't a detriment to large systems. The platform as we have today is simultaneously weak in terms of its stagnant and outpaced feature set, and strong in terms of its optimization capability and ecosystem size. But its strengths were a function of its popularity: lots of people wrote Java so there was plenty of incentive to invest in the platform/ecosystem. The only way I could see it taking off today as a new language is if there were a company willing to dump 10x the resources into it that Oracle or Sun ever have.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago
object orientation taken to its logical conclusion Oh, how I wish. OO was never taken to its logical conclusion in the mainstream at all. Java's Nygaard-style OO was just a sugar coating on top of a generic procedural paradigm and a far cry from Smalltalk's example that was set over 20 years prior. Ironically, much of the JVM's early optimizations were born out of research into the Self VM - a prototype-based OO Smalltalk environment. Yet thanks to C++ and Java's object models following the Simula legacy becoming so firmly entrenched into the mainstream as the OO, today the entire paradigm has become disgraced and is outright reviled in some circles (how many times have I seen FP enthusiasts jump every time it's mentioned...) The Smalltalk and Self communities are minuscule. A more recent addition was the Io language, but that too is very small. OO died before it could really shine, though the Smalltalkers' legacy did somewhat live on as they went on to establish many of the software development methodologies and maxims that are taken for granted today.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  OO's death has been exaggerated. Take a language like Scala, which has really powerful OOP constructs in the form of mixin-style traits (at least on the static side of object innovation). Not to mention many of the strongtalk people are now working Dart. Objects will rise again (if you think they've fallen, that is).
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    I agree somewhat. You can also find object models in plenty of other places where many don't realize it (e.g. in many practical implementations of actor model concurrency). Those are all relatively small and indirect victories though. Who knows - maybe pure message passing languages might become the next fad soon enough.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      The Clojure and Go people always like to talk about their non-object systems, which are of course very object-like. The only real functional purists is the haskell community. I'm personally working a new language/programming environment right now based on traits/mixins; there is still a lot of fun to be had there.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

object orientation taken to its logical conclusion Oh, how I wish. OO was never taken to its logical conclusion in the mainstream at all. Java's Nygaard-style OO was just a sugar coating on top of a generic procedural paradigm and a far cry from Smalltalk's example that was set over 20 years prior. Ironically, much of the JVM's early optimizations were born out of research into the Self VM - a prototype-based OO Smalltalk environment. Yet thanks to C++ and Java's object models following the Simula legacy becoming so firmly entrenched into the mainstream as the OO, today the entire paradigm has become disgraced and is outright reviled in some circles (how many times have I seen FP enthusiasts jump every time it's mentioned...) The Smalltalk and Self communities are minuscule. A more recent addition was the Io language, but that too is very small. OO died before it could really shine, though the Smalltalkers' legacy did somewhat live on as they went on to establish many of the software development methodologies and maxims that are taken for granted today.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
OO's death has been exaggerated. Take a language like Scala, which has really powerful OOP constructs in the form of mixin-style traits (at least on the static side of object innovation). Not to mention many of the strongtalk people are now working Dart. Objects will rise again (if you think they've fallen, that is).
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  I agree somewhat. You can also find object models in plenty of other places where many don't realize it (e.g. in many practical implementations of actor model concurrency). Those are all relatively small and indirect victories though. Who knows - maybe pure message passing languages might become the next fad soon enough.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    The Clojure and Go people always like to talk about their non-object systems, which are of course very object-like. The only real functional purists is the haskell community. I'm personally working a new language/programming environment right now based on traits/mixins; there is still a lot of fun to be had there.