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I worked in IT from the 90s to today. My perspective is it grew and grew because Sun supported it, then IBM supported it, RedHat supported it. It had the glimme

I worked in IT from the 90s to today. My perspective is it grew and grew because Sun supported it, then IBM supported it, RedHat supported it. It had the glimmer that it was the "Enterprise Way" of doing "Real IT" programming for "Real Businesses". I am not saying any of that is the "Truth", just the perception that was held by the majority of people who could choose what to write enterprise code in.

toyg 1y ago
> Sun supported it, then IBM supported it, RedHat supported it And Oracle (well before the Sun acquisition - in fact, control of Java was basically the main cause of that move). Any technology that could bag both IBM and Oracle is (or rather was) likely to dominate the enterprise space.
fidotron 1y ago
What was the viable alternative? Microsoft had C#, at one point IBM pushed SmallTalk. C++ for these environments is doable but going to slow you down at development a lot, as well as being much harder to secure. At that time the dynamic alternative was Perl, and that remained true basically until Rails came along.
- hackthemack 1y ago
  I am not sure. C# came long after Java already made inroads into the Enterprise space. It was a different time. I would say that many things in IT are not chosen on technical merits alone. You have people that do not want to accrue any blame. Back then, by choosing what IBM endorses or what Microsoft endorses, you absolve yourself of fallout from if and when things go wrong. Back in the 90s, it felt like IBM, Redhat, Sun kind of, sort of, got together and wanted to keep Microsoft from taking over the Enterprise space by offering Java solutions.
  - nradov 1y ago
    Right. Before Microsoft created .NET and C# they first tried to play their "embrace, extend, extinguish" trick with Java. They released a JVM and "Visual J++" language which was sort of Java, but had incompatible proprietary extensions to lock customers in to Windows. Eventually they were forced to stop that for legal reasons so they completely dropped all Java support, and built their own replacement virtual machine and associated languages from scratch.
    - sirsinsalot 1y ago
      And even today some people don't worry about Microsoft's ownership and stewardship of things like Github.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  C++ or maybe Objective-C. Of course those were much more hazardous languages than Java.
  - fidotron 1y ago
    Oh yeah, WebObjects! I had forgotten that entirely, and it then transitioned to Java itself.
aaronbaugher 1y ago
Yes, its early popularity was very much management-driven, based on magazine articles and the like. Its object-oriented design (often presented as if something new) was supposed to make programmers fungible, and its portability was supposed to let you build an app that would run on anything. And it had a Real Corporation behind it, which appealed to corporate management. In the late 90s, I got stuck making a scheduling program in Java, but it had to run on the 16-bit Windows systems of the time. That was a huge pain, because the 16-bit version didn't have all the capabilities that management was expecting based on the hype. These days, I sometimes have to install enormous enterprise applications that tie up north of 32G of RAM even though they're just basic hardware management tools that would take a fraction of that if built in something like C++ with a standard GUI library. I manage to avoid Java most of the time, but it's been an occasional thorn in my side for 30 years.

toyg 1y ago

> Sun supported it, then IBM supported it, RedHat supported it And Oracle (well before the Sun acquisition - in fact, control of Java was basically the main cause of that move). Any technology that could bag both IBM and Oracle is (or rather was) likely to dominate the enterprise space.

fidotron 1y ago

What was the viable alternative? Microsoft had C#, at one point IBM pushed SmallTalk. C++ for these environments is doable but going to slow you down at development a lot, as well as being much harder to secure. At that time the dynamic alternative was Perl, and that remained true basically until Rails came along.

hackthemack 1y ago
I am not sure. C# came long after Java already made inroads into the Enterprise space. It was a different time. I would say that many things in IT are not chosen on technical merits alone. You have people that do not want to accrue any blame. Back then, by choosing what IBM endorses or what Microsoft endorses, you absolve yourself of fallout from if and when things go wrong. Back in the 90s, it felt like IBM, Redhat, Sun kind of, sort of, got together and wanted to keep Microsoft from taking over the Enterprise space by offering Java solutions.
- nradov 1y ago
  Right. Before Microsoft created .NET and C# they first tried to play their "embrace, extend, extinguish" trick with Java. They released a JVM and "Visual J++" language which was sort of Java, but had incompatible proprietary extensions to lock customers in to Windows. Eventually they were forced to stop that for legal reasons so they completely dropped all Java support, and built their own replacement virtual machine and associated languages from scratch.
  - sirsinsalot 1y ago
    And even today some people don't worry about Microsoft's ownership and stewardship of things like Github.
SoftTalker 1y ago
C++ or maybe Objective-C. Of course those were much more hazardous languages than Java.
- fidotron 1y ago
  Oh yeah, WebObjects! I had forgotten that entirely, and it then transitioned to Java itself.

aaronbaugher 1y ago

Yes, its early popularity was very much management-driven, based on magazine articles and the like. Its object-oriented design (often presented as if something new) was supposed to make programmers fungible, and its portability was supposed to let you build an app that would run on anything. And it had a Real Corporation behind it, which appealed to corporate management. In the late 90s, I got stuck making a scheduling program in Java, but it had to run on the 16-bit Windows systems of the time. That was a huge pain, because the 16-bit version didn't have all the capabilities that management was expecting based on the hype. These days, I sometimes have to install enormous enterprise applications that tie up north of 32G of RAM even though they're just basic hardware management tools that would take a fraction of that if built in something like C++ with a standard GUI library. I manage to avoid Java most of the time, but it's been an occasional thorn in my side for 30 years.