@property - take it behind the woodshed and shoot it?

[Jeff Nowakowski]

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.