Re:Ask HN: Why does the enterprise have such a strong affini...
by jtheory on Saturday July 26, 2014 @08:46PM
(#8091490)
Yup -- I was taking intro & mid-level CS courses in 1996/7, and they set us up to code in Java (with an IDE called Roaster) as the "wave of the future", and easier to work with than C or C++ (though we used C for some classes).
We were mostly writing applications, applets, and command-line stuff, and my first server-side code was in a long-forgotten CGI-based scripting language, but I seem to recall it wasn't too long after that that ColdFusion was re-written into Java (so that even if you build your site in CF, it was actually executing on Java); that was a pretty strong corporate & technical endorsement.
For instance even though Java 1.0 was released in 1996, IBM got on board in 1995 and by the start of 1997 had contributed good internationalization. (See http://www.icu-project.org/docs/papers/history_of_java_inter... for a reference.) By late 1997 when I became a software developer, there was already a feeling that Java was "the official corporate future of the web". (At least by those who didn't expect Microsoft to take over the world.) But in the meantime would I mind learning Perl and CGI to teach my co-workers how to get small stuff done?
I never looked back. :-)
ADDITION: See http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1998-09-11/news/990112009... for an early timeline. Note the many, many corporate licensees very early in the process.
The truth is that everyone was deathly afraid that Microsoft would destroy the industry. The web was seen as a godsend, and the fact that Java wound up tied to the web by Netscape right at the beginning meant that everyone jumped on Java with the web. By the time the dust settled, you had a ton of big corporations involved, and it was guaranteed at that point that the language would evolve to suit their needs.