> I'm sure there were lots of discussions about Java vs. C++ earlier in their lifespans
Rewind to 1996. I’m at the Networld/Interop conference in Las Vegas. The steel skeleton of the Ballagio looms over desert mirages, and Java is all things to all people: a wide-open utopia to be populated by new and perfect code, a new world without concern for memory management, an abstraction from everything freeing us all from needing to know anything.
That's why so many threads end up being about Rust vs. Go. They are the new(ish) languages that appear most likely to be real factors in the industry for a very long time, so they bear more discussion.
I wasn't really around for it, but I'm sure there were lots of discussions about Java vs. C++ earlier in their lifespans, for this same reason.