The Reason For Java's Staying Power: It's Easy To Read

jfruh writes: Java made its public debut twenty years ago today, and despite a sometimes bumpy history that features its parent company being absorbed by Oracle, it's still widely used. Mark Reinhold, chief architect for the Oracle's Java platform group, offers one explanation for its continuing popularity: it's easy for humans to understand it at a glance. "It is pretty easy to read Java code and figure out what it means. There aren't a lot of obscure gotchas in the language ... Most of the cost of maintaining any body of code over time is in maintenance, not in initial creation."

Comments

Re:"Easy to read" is non-sense

[anarkhos]

It's not nonsense, it's bullshit.

Not only is Java NOT easy to read, it clearly has nothing to do with its popularity.

The reason it's popular is for the same reason smalltalk was not: vendor support. Java was free with multi-platform compilers and corporate support. It was pushed heavily in universities which is how this foul language spread. There is nothing inherent about Java which made it popular.

You could say the same thing about UNIX.