Una opinión sobre el valor de Java

En el curso de una discusión sobre Dart en Google+, Rafael Chaves da una interesante visión sobre Java:

"Java was not innovative at the time, and did kill many OO languages initiatives"

I am not sure Java killed other initiatives - I feel more like they were dead on arrival, at least from a market suitability PoV.

The non-technical aspects are just as important as technical merits. It does not matter how cool a language is, if it is not going to be supported by multiple vendors/platforms, if it evolves in a way that invalidates previous investments, if it is hard to learn for the average developer, if doesn't have proper support for a wide variety of application styles/domains, if is going to be hard to hire people. Getting that right is as critical as (or even more than) technical benefits.

Java got all those right, and that is why it succeeded. I don't think it is a lot about money. Sun could have poured twice as much money into it, but if they failed to recognize the importance of those aspects, it would have been a flop, or have limited success (see Microsoft .Net). But these days I wouldn't bet against similar success being attainable by an open source foundation with a strong community, without nearly the same level of financial backing, if they aimed for building for the mainstream and the long term like Sun did with Java.

As a developer, I want my investment in learning my next language to pay off for as long and across as many domains and technical architectures as possible. That is much more important than having the perfect feature set.

...y a propósito del valor de Dart, Angel "Java" López ha abierto una línea de discusión e información.