While I usually agree, in this case I found it a very interesting. pg is a very influential figure in many business circles, but for a lot of people on HN, pg is a very influential hacker, who has thought a lot about hacking and the software creation business, and has very graciously let us look into those thoughts. From that lens, this is a very interesting article.
I personally think this article makes great predictions. Obviously, Java has since become an incredibly popular language. But I still think there are many people (including me!) who have the same beliefs about Java as are shown in the article. Many people consider it a much more "business-y" or "bureacratic" language than, say, Python/Ruby or many others.
pg never said Java would be unpopular. He dismissed it much as he dismissed Cobol and Visual Basic. In 1990 Cobol was the most popular programming language in the world [1]. And in 2000 Visual Basic was the most popular programming language in the world [2].
The essay is about hacker's radar, not Java, anyway. Personally I loved his list of other technologies he has ignored.
From the article: "So far, Java seems like a stinker to me. I've never written a Java program, never more than glanced over reference books about it, but I have a hunch that it won't be a very successful language."
I think that pretty clearly says that (at that time) he didn't think it'd be very popular.
So, you think popularity is success? I think that when Paul says "success", he means "winning" in an old sense that "those who adopt X have a better chance at winning" whatever it is. Just because the language is widely used doesn't mean it's contributing to the success of the adopters.
So how would you propose measuring "contributing to the success of the adopters" ? It seems that there is no way to either prove or disprove the statement hence any statement about the "success" of a language could be claimed as valid/true.
>So far, Java seems like a stinker to me. I've never written a Java program, never more than glanced over reference books about it, but I have a hunch that it won't be a very successful language.
I could go through and dispute his points one by one in traditional internet style but to do so would be to miss the fundamental difference in viewpoint. A piece of art can be considered aesthetically unsuccessful while still being a massive commercial hit.
The liberal hacker will generally consider Java (if not the JVM) a failure.
The conservative software developer will generally consider Java (and the JVM) massively successful.
So if PG was considering the market success of this "stinker" then no, his prediction was clearly a failure. But if you consider the aesthetic success? Well, Java certainly isn't cool in certain circles.
Personally I like Java and consider it successful - but I don't think PG's article is prima facie a prophetic failure.
Java was an incredibly popular language in 2001. I had been using it in commercial apps for four years. It was around 2001 that I was managing a development team and was introduced to Python. About that time, I also began to realize how expensive Java development was and how many more interesting ideas were happening in other languages.
While it was clear Java was popular, it was also clear it was stagnating under the beurocracy and the weight of its corporate champions (small changes and backwards compatible at all costs). It also became clear that there weren't going to be many repeats of Java's initial ideas.
On the insights, I probably give Java more credit for than pg would because they pretty much all exist in lisp, but Joy packaged them for "easy" consumption. Arguably, the most important was the JVM and the notion that bits didn't need to run on the metal directly. This was well known to the lisp and smalltalk communities but shunned more generally, but Java made it acceptable across the computing ecosystem to run in a VM. This really opened doors for languages like Python and Ruby. It would be interesting to know if they would have been as popular without Java and it's corporate marketing machine telling developers VM are good.
I am not disputing the fact that the idea of virtual machines was popularized for a new generation of developers by Java. However it goes back commercially a lot farther than I think you, or most software developers, realize.
IBM started shipping mainframes where everything ran inside of a virtual machine 40 years ago this year with VM/370. Its purpose was to emulate previous IBM hardware running a previous IBM operating system. People today are able to run applications written in the 60s mainframes without change in part because the radical changes in underlying hardware have been hidden from them by layers of virtual machines.
Of course there are many predecessors. After all Lisp has been running in a virtual machine ever since the first one, in 1957. But IBM is the first instance that I know about where a company shipped machines to paying commercial customers that wanted to run software inside of a virtual machine.
I personally think this article makes great predictions. Obviously, Java has since become an incredibly popular language. But I still think there are many people (including me!) who have the same beliefs about Java as are shown in the article. Many people consider it a much more "business-y" or "bureacratic" language than, say, Python/Ruby or many others.