Another issue was the potential popularity of a lang
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When Java first hit the streets, mobile code was a hot topic. General Magic was promoting their Magic Cap environment, featuring mobile code ("agents") heavily, and powered by a language called Telescript. Nathaniel Borenstein was researching "active mail", sending active invitations and the like via email using a dialect of Tcl called Safe-Tcl. Someone (I can't remember who at the moment) was developing roughly equivalent functionality in Perl (the Safe.pm module). Luca Cardelli at DEC was developing a beautiful and novel little language called Obliq.
All of those languages supported secure mobile code, and all of them used very different security models. My memory of Telescript is fuzzy, but I know for a fact that Java is the only one of the rest that is statically typed. And I remember from my evaluation at the time that Java and Telescript had the two most complex security models (and complexity is not a good thing in a security model).
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The above extract from the link points out some other work that was being done but one also needs to take into account the political dynamics of the day ...
- MS was creaming the market & competition with its classic tactics
- IBM decided to get behind Sun's Java (Oak) as a counterbalance to MS propaganda about DCOM (and DCOM & Active-X's inherent weakness for net use)
- Smalltalk was there but had completely failed to garner popular support. This went beyond the effort of the various ST tool vendors
- Java won because it was so familiar to the multitudes of C & C++ programmers. Java was very shallow when it 1st came out (effectively in ver 1.0.3). Over 5 years, Sun IBM HP & others developed the bulk of what is J2SE & J2EE today. That Java has many flaws didn't stop it carving out an empire that tipped MS temporarily on its ear. MS had to go back to the drawing board & invent .NET & C#
- The other languages that were or were about to enter the scene had no substantial backers that would enable them to do any better than Smalltalk in garnering market share, some appear to have been still borns.
What ST vs Java taught me was that elegance (ST) does not dictate victory. Also I believe there is much confusion (due to time passing) over the issue of Java's strong typing. It was the strong typing and thus tiny code packets that enabled Java's applet concept to work well over WANS & appear secure (just a pity that MS succeeded in poisoning Applets with their 'dirty' Java VM back in MSIE 2 & 3.
Cheers
Doug Marker
