Comment by w10-1

It's nice to review the features, but the history of Java isn't really about features or even programmer popularity.

(1) It was the first disruptive enterprise business model. They aimed to make everyone a Java programmer with free access (to reduce the cost of labor), but then charge for enterprise (and embedded and browser) VM's and containers. They did this to undercut the well-entrenched Microsoft and IBM. (IBM followed suit immediately by dumping their high-end IDE and supporting the free Eclipse. This destroyed competition from Borland and other IDE makers tying their own libraries and programming models.)

(2) As an interpreted language, Java became viable only with good JIT's. Borland's was the first (in JDK 1.1.7), but soon Urs Holzle, a UCSB professor, created the HotSpot compiler that has seeded generations of performance gains. The VM and JIT made it possible to navigate the many generations of hardware delivering and orders-of-magnitude improvements and putting software in every product. Decoupling hardware and software reduced the vertical integration that was killing customers (which also adversely affected Sun Microsystems).

btw, Urs Holzle went on to become Google employee #8 and was responsible for Google using massively parallel off-the-shelf hardware in its data centers. He made Google dreams possible.