Comment by cogman10

> I said they would have been relegated to history if they didn't become usable due to hardware increases.

And I disagree with this assessment. These languages became popular before they were fast or the hardware support was mature. They may have taken different evolution routes, but they still found themselves useful.

Python, for example, entered in a world where perl was being used for one off scripts in the shell. Python replacing perl would have still happened because the performance characteristics of it (and what perl replaced, bash scripts) is similar. We may not have used python or ruby as web backends because they were too slow for that purpose. That, however, doesn't mean we wouldn't have used them for all sorts of other tasks including data processing.

> Remember that Java was not designed as a enterprise/server language. Sun pivoted when it failed at its original task (set top boxes). It was only able to pivot due to hardware performance increases.

Right, but the java of old was extremely slow compared to today's Java. The JVM for Java 1 to 1.4 was dogshit. It wasn't hardware that made it fast.

Yet still, java was pretty popular even without a fast JVM and JIT. Hotspot would have still likely happened but maybe the GC would have evolved differently as the current crop of GC algorithms trade memory for performance. In a constrained environment Java may have never adopted moving collectors and instead relied on Go like collection strategies.

Java applets were a thing in the 90s even though hardware was slow and memory constrained. That's because the JVM was simply a different beast in that era. One better suited to the hardware at the time.

Even today, Java runs on hardware that is roughly 80s quality (see Java Card). It's deployed on very limited hardware.

What you are mistaking is the modern JVM's performance characteristics for Java's requirements for running. The JVM evolved with hardware and made tradeoffs appropriate for Java's usage and hardware capabilities.

I remember the early era of the internet. I ran Java applets in my netscape and IE browsers on a computer with 32MB of ram and a 233MHz processor. It was fine.