Quote Originally Posted by Sebastiani View Post
To be sure, Java certainly does have it's uses, and it's overall vision of interoperability is quite admirable. In that respect, I would even go as far as to say that it has fundamentally changed the face of software development. Still, the language itself is rather limited, and could have been much better, IMO.
Java was originally intended to be a full implimentation of C/C++ that could execute in a VM so as to protect the local machine from potentially malicious code. It never got that far of course. It turns out that a fully interpreted C/C++ machine was extremely slow on the hardware of the day (mid 90's 286-486/early pentiums) so the language never fully realized that goal. A lot of the tradeof's to get it to execute at decent speed have become inherent weaknesses in the language. Unfortunately there is so much code out there for java that it probably wont ever die, and as long as there is a VM language available that is more fully developed any new fledgling effort to build a true VM version of C/C++ will probably not receive any notice.