Re:Functional programming is not popular because it is weird...
by virgilp on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @10:19AM
(#28525219)
I wrote another comment where I explained "popular due to jvm" better - the productivity gain was real, but came from the GC which was....JVM. No, the JVM wasn't hated initially - not until it became hugely popular and people started pushing it to the limit. Or well, at least that's how I remember the history, I might be wrong; human brains are notoriously fallible and I'm too lazy to search and validate/confirm my version of it :)
That's not how history played out at all. Java spent much of its life being pitched as a way to make C++ developers more productive.
The jvm was actively hated by many for years - slow startup times, excessive memory usage, it didn't used to enjoy the rich tooling ecosystem it has now and it was seen as opaque and hard to tweak for performance.
To this day it's not that hard to find Java devs who want off the hotspot jvm - whether that's to go onto other JVMs with different tradeoffs (Azul or whatever) or whether to go native compilation (GraalVM) instead.