What are the other assumptions in this hypothetical scenario? Does C# exist? Does Scala exist? Does F# exist? You could argue that none of these would exist if

What are the other assumptions in this hypothetical scenario? Does C# exist? Does Scala exist? Does F# exist? You could argue that none of these would exist if Java didn't. What might we have instead? C/C++ of course, Python/Perl/Ruby and friends too. QBASIC is older than Java and Visual Basic was just a cleaned up QBASIC, so we'd have that. Borland's Pascal-derivative Delphi was a decent language; maybe that would've done better without Java. Would Haskell and the MLs have done better? Perhaps, because at the time it came around Java was quite a productive language. Or maybe I should say, it was a nice language before everybody and their uncle discovered the design patterns book and started implementing AbstractFactoryInterpreterEventLists willy-nilly. Without Java, I think it's plausible that the design pattern craze - a lot of which is just attempting to shoehorn functional programming into an OO language - would never have happened. And people might've discovered actual functional programming earlier and the state of the art might've been closer to F# than C#. So back to the original question, in this scenario, Java wouldn't make it, because honestly, although Java is a decent language but F# and friends are way better.