Objective-C was going nowhere before Apple's acquisition, my thesis was rewriting a particle system from Objective-C/NeXT into C++/Windows as means for the department to keep research in OSes that everyone else could use.

Ada compilers were bloody expensive.

Modula-2, Delphi, VB, Oberon, Modula-3,..., were great, but they were either only available commercially, or OS specific.

Java was given away as free beer, with a batteries included standard library and with less hurdles than trying to write portable C or pre-C++98 across all platforms that existed in the 90's.

That alone made us try it out,

On my university, the computing department changed all the compiler design and distributed computing classes to Java, without Sun paying anything to a tiny Portuguese university.