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That quickly became C# though which is very good and very popular.

Edit you're right, C# and J# coexisted. I think its still the theme of MS using their own JVM then moving it to dotnet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J_Sharp

Oh yeah, C# is superb and even offers some features Java doesn’t such as limited operating overloading. My dabble in J# was brief but interesting and served as a smooth transition to C#.

That was J++.

J# was Java for .NET, a C# sibling.

I do, even have some books and other related stuff around.

Microsoft’s attempt to “embrace, extend, extinguish” Java? Of course, though that ultimately turns into C#

Visual J# was Java as a CLR language. Visual J++ was closer to what you mean - it was the Java language and VM with some things deleted from Sun’s distribution (RMI) and some things added like WFC. They also made some breaking language extensions like delegates that later became part of C#, and were somewhat analogous to features that appeared in Sun’s Java 1.1.

Funnily enough, I learned Java in the summer of 1997 in the VJ++ IDE from MSDN tutorial videos, spent a good chunk of my early career doing Java at various places and now work for MSR where I often use Java (or the JVM) on Linux.