How did Sun manage to get so much hype around Java?
There can't be many things in tech which have had that kind of PR achievement, especially if you move away from flashy user-facing things like iPhones and Playstations.
There can't be many things in tech which have had that kind of PR achievement, especially if you move away from flashy user-facing things like iPhones and Playstations.
There was a huge hype train around object-oriented development being the way that somewhat continues to this day. OO was all the rage along with the "Design Patterns" book. OO hype in the enterprise also seemed to drive CS departments to use Java for just about all classes because it was "pragmatic" and a "real" job skill to give students.
I mainly remember being excited about garbage collection.
They were kind of clunky, but anyone who had the responsibility of managing a client-server app across a fleet of PCs would have had a lightbulb go on over their head on seeing that.
The university hype seems to have been real as well; I was being taught Java in late 1997, when it had only launched in 1996 and was maybe on version 1.1? Previous years were taught object orientation through Modula-3, and you really don't see a lot of that these days. Java offers the decisive advantage of braces rather than BEGIN..END.
No one even tried to solve this problem until Java came along and made it performant through bytecode JIT.
His thesis is object oriented programming wasn't inevitable or is the best way to program. It was an accident of history that OOP became so popular.
Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? – Richard Feldman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4
Another Java tidbit is that Miguel de Icaza (Gnome, Mono) really wanted an open source higher level language on Linux so he approached Sun about Java and they wouldn't work with him, so he settled on C# and is probably the man most responsible for the move to cross platform C# and .NET (dotnetcore, v5)