On Wednesday, 23 January 2019 at 12:26:02 UTC, rikki cattermole
wrote:
Java's killer feature is consistent simplicity. That is how it
was originally sold to great success. The ecosystem and tooling
came later.
Also, the Internet was Java's killer application. No other
language had the libraries for accessing the Internet easily.
Then there is dynamic class loading. This made things a little
bit more unsafe at runtime but in general developer productivity
rose sharply, comparable to Smalltalk and by order of magnitude
compared to C++. At that time the competition for Java was only
Smalltalk and C++. Performance was nevertheless good, because of
runtime code optimization (HotSpot), which was a new thing
(albeit taken from Strongtalk, some Smalltalk high performance
variant)
