Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language)

["Alexander E. Kopilovich" <aek@VB1162.spb.edu>]

Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

> > In the case of Java the most significant reason for that skyrocketed
> > success was (I think) not just luck and aggressive marketing, but very
> > high level of professional traitorousness among CS teachers in American
> > universities. In late 90th they massively adopted Java for their courses
> > despite obvious defects of the language (the most beautiful example is
> > absence of enumerations in Java - before appearance of Java those academic
> > people always claimed that enumerations are very important and necessary,
> > but no one them said a word about their absence in Java - they were too
> > busy in praising Java to notice such a tiny detail).
>
> But why they adopted Java? It was the same combination of luck and marketing
> Randy Brukardt wrote about.

Why you, not being an American, use this luck-based theory, which is proprietary
American? -:)  Do you really think that Sun, when investing not small money in
that Java move, did so just in adventurous hope of meeting luck on the road?
Didn't you noticed how IBM pushed Java all the way - was it just luck for Sun?

> That time many of them had Sun worstations
>avaiable. Nobody ever liked Microsoft. End of story. 

I don't think that availability of Sun workstations played significant role
there - nobody liked Sun workstations too much (except of those who used
multiprocessors, which couldn't be widely available in universities)... some
liked SGIs, some Alphas, but I never heard of anyone being particularly fond
of uniprocessor Sun workstation.

And frowning at the Microsoft played no role there - in fact, Microsoft readily
produced their JVM and equipped IE accordingly (the fact that MS "tried to
poison" Java is immaterial here as we talk about skyrocketed adoption of Java
language).

There was real matter that time - dot-coms were booming and there was widespread
strong feeling about the need of easily distributable specialized clients for
online shopping. And this was the trampoline for Java - applets. Then, after
several years, dot-com bubble bursted, applets faded, but critical mass for
the language was already reached - thanks to conformant university CS teachers
in big part.



Alexander Kopilovitch                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
Saint-Petersburg
Russia