What Java did right (was Re: Y Store now C++)

[Neel Krishnaswami <address@hidden>]

Sundar Narasimhan writes:
> 
> There are problems that I had in 94-95 that were not solved by
> languages that were available then -- as there are today. Some of
> them I could paper over with JNI calling fortran or C. And many of
> the languages that people discuss on this list weren't around in the
> time frame I'm talking about. I am saying I've talked to people who
> made decisions to adopt Java in their work, and that they seemed
> intelligent and not the kind to be swayed by marketing hype alone..

In your opinion, what did Java's designers do right, to persuade
people to use it?

I mean this as a serious question; languages like Perl, Java, and
Javascript are obviously successful, and it seems worthwhile to figure
out what makes them so.

-- 
Neel Krishnaswami
neelk@alum.mit.edu