::scr Touchy Feely?

[Martin Coxall]

> >> And which are lifted straight from Smalltalk.
> >
> > No point reinventing the wheel, after all.
> 
> Indeed. So I'm still not sure why they bothered inventing Java in the
> first place. Just get a decent Smalltalk VM ported to oodles of
> platforms. (Yes, I know...)

Well, it was never meant to challenge SmallTalk, of course. Project Oak
(from whence Java) was intended for washing machines and fridges and
that. Then the web happened, then applets. Then people realised applets
were cack. Then Sun started with the buzzwords and it took off as a
server-side development language because middle managers "like that sort
of thing".

It was a bit of an accident, I guess. That and the fact that Java has
reassuringly familiar C-like syntax, when SmallTalk has unreassuringly
bonkers syntax.

Martin