From: Kev Jackson <kevin.jackson@...>
Date: 2005-07-22T11:50:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby/Rails as a starter language?


>
> Man, this makes me feel old.
>
> Giving Java credit for vm design, no pointers, safe code, unit testing 
> (SUnuit!), etc. is laughable.
>
> Smalltalk (and others too...) provided all of this LONG before Java 
> was even a twinkling in the eye of Sun's marketing & sales departments.
>
> [rest snipped]
>
>>
Smalltalk had p-code and vms, but Javas VM is a very aggressively 
optimized design.  I was suggesting that the Java team did a good job of 
pulling together different pieces and making them fairly mainstream.  To 
be honest you might as well say Lisp had everything before anyone else - 
muhahahahahaha! Lisp rocks!  But I wasn't saying that Java was first, 
rather that Java represented (for a time being) a stage of language 
evolution that was fairly cutting edge, without users having to adopt a 
radically different programming model (SML, Lisp, Prolog etc).  So yeah, 
I know Smalltalk was first (for many things), but Smalltalk (much as it 
was loved by many in IBM and other big shops) didn't have the hype and 
marketing.

Like it or not, it was Sun's marketing that drove VMs, safe code etc 
into the mainstream.  Do you think without Java Microsoft would have 
produced .Net?  The next stage of C evolution?

Again, to re-iterate, I'm not suggesting that Java was first at 
anything, rather that it was first to push these ideas out of the niches 
and into mainstream programming.

Kev