Re: Y Store now C++

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

   > b. java became
   >successful because of a platform need/competitive
   >positioning/marketing by Sun as meeting that need. 
   >
   But that's just what I mean about the right place at the right time. 
    Java was not
   developed from the beginning with the idea in mind that it would be the
   language for writing browser applets.  That came along when Java happened
   to be well-poised to be a good language for that purpose, and Sun jumped
   on it.

Actually that's not what I meant. Much as though history (perhaps this
is MSFT marketing -- after all, if they get people to believe that
'Java was written specifically for browser applets', and then 'applets
never took off' then it would be easy to finish Java off with getting
people to conclude 'Java never took off' which is their classic
marketing technique) would have you believe this -- it is simply not
true. Or, at best, it's only part of the story.

My own personal experience should be a case in point -- I read the Oak
specs in 95-96 (I think), and having come off of two massive C++
projects, I remember writing on my copy of the spec "C++ is
dead. Switch to this!" and passing it around members of our
dev. team. Applets was the furthest from my mind at the time. I just
saw Java always as a credible alternative to C++ without the latter's
complexities (we tore our hair out trying to fix compiler bugs in C++
exception handling and template instantiations in libraries).
Corporate customers I've talked to tell a similar story. (All of them
were burning $$ on C/C++ projects -- and were casting about for
alternatives -- and here was an answer that actually had JNI -- MSFT
made a play for that too w/ RNI which played in the first Java suit --
and hence we all could see a way of leveraging our existing
codebases).  I also distinctly remember dollar cost arguments.. if you
threw in the cost of compilers (all Unix vendors were unbundling C++
compilers at the time), memory debugging tools (you had to have
Purify/Quantify/NuMega type stuff), and other such sundries.. a modern
C++ dev. environment (at that time) was not cheap. Compared to that,
Java was well.. free!  Better, it alleged to have answers for all the
platform questions -- it came with GC, multi-threading, a GUI library
(AWT -- morphing to Swing), JDBC, IBM/Taligent/even MSFT was involved
in the early days -- which meant we knew what was going to go in there
etc. 

To cut a long story short, I completely disagree that Java was written
for applets or marketed solely as that. Sun may certainly have done
some of this during the internet boom, but smart people did NOT move
to Java because of applets -- God knows that we (and I'm including
others in the industry I've talked to) never made money off of applets
-- Lotus did try for a while with an SDK and InfoBus, Corel tried w/
an office thingie. We all thought applets were just a flashy way of
getting some marketing $$.. but the real $$ were always in the back
end stuff - in server apps, in client/server apps, in distributed
apps, in web apps. Let's not kid ourselves and look at Java's history
simplistically -- or we'll all learn the wrong lesson(s).