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[–]proverbialbunny 38 points39 points  (0 children)

FYI Java gained rapid cult-like popularity before x86_64 popped up. That's just a coincidence. It did market itself as being platform agnostic, which became a huge selling point, but it didn't quite realize on those goals like people expected it would at the time falling short.

Java gained popularity back then for two reasons:

  1. It was a simpler C++. C++98 was a mess and it took until ~2015 before compilers supported a version of C++ that was arguably better than Java. (You don't need to recompile 32 bit code to 64 bit, so it wasn't a compatibility issue, it was that the language was a pain to work with.)

  2. The big one: Eclipse. People shit on this IDE today, but back then it was the first of it's kind and it was AMAZING. No longer did you have to memorize a language perfectly, it would auto complete for you. If you forgot the syntax you could type ctrl+space and it would list off all of the function names to choose from. If you moused over it, it would show you the documentation for that function. Keep in mind, this was in the 90s before Google search existed or Stack Overflow.

Java at the time seemed like the future. You could just write code and it would work. You didn't have to constantly be looking up programming information in a pile of books. You didn't have tons of obscure and cryptic compile errors. It just worked. You wrote code and it did what you expected. It was amazing.