On 01/27/2013 09:26 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Language adoption is a complex phenomenon with many variables, and it's
easy to neglect certain aspects when assessing the impact of others.
Indeed it is, as you show below.
Java started as a well-designed language albeit small and underpowered.
It enjoyed the benefit of unwavering support from a large corporation
and an estimated one billion dollars in marketing budget. (I remember in
1998 non-programming managers in NYC were talking "we must adopt Java!"
without even knowing what Java meant. Java may as well be the only
programming language in history to enjoy management support before
programmer support.)
First off, where do you get this billion dollar marketing figure from?
I've seen it from you before, with no citation, and could find no such
citation myself when doing a Web search.
Second, Java was a "right place, right time" language. It was initially
pegged for consumer devices, and was part of a bid to get cable company
adoption for a TV add-on device, but when that fell flat it occurred to
them the Web was a good fit. It was (in theory, but not in practice --
Flash ended up winning the browser), the hype machine exploded, and the
rest is history. For example, if you read this article here:
http://vidlar.powweb.com/internett/the-java_net/history.html
...you'll see their growth was fairly organic. Yes, I'm sure they had a
marketing budget, but I highly doubt that in 1998 they were spending $1
billion.
That has caused Java to evolve quite differently from languages with
grass-roots support (e.g. C++, Ruby, PHP, or Python). Generally the
latter languages grew with little tooling support aside from the
traditional Unix toolset, and that is to some extent reflected in the
languages themselves.
One thing you're missing about Java is that because of it's simplicity
of design and static typing, it was so easy to write tools for. No crazy
macros or templates, and lots of type information.
The same goes about C#, which was designed from day 1 assuming resources
are available for dedicated tooling support. It would have evolved
differently otherwise, and I assume many people would have a dimmer view
of either Java or C# if they had to use it with vim and emacs.
That may be true for C#, but in the early days for Java I don't recall
an IDE out of the box from Sun. For many it was emacs or whatever, then
there was JBuilder (from Borland), and then IBM and IntelliJ, etc.
