If you’re familiar with Java here in 2025, the programming language you know is a world away from what Sun Microsystems planned for it in the mid-1990s. Back then it was key to a bright coffe…
The idea of Java was grand. Too many of the people who were involved in making it had been corrupted by C++, though. If it had been people who had come up with Lisp and Smalltalk, the execution would have had some elegance, and it maybe could have been a masterpiece.
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
The idea of Java was grand. Too many of the people who were involved in making it had been corrupted by C++, though. If it had been people who had come up with Lisp and Smalltalk, the execution would have had some elegance, and it maybe could have been a masterpiece.
-Alan Kay