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by ChuckMcM 3318 days ago
Wow. For those who don't know, there was a big 'language bake off' at Sun between TCL, Java, and Self (all being funded by Sun Labs) and Bert Sutherland (then director of Sun Labs and brother of Ivan) required that the language changes stop and then we'd look at each one, and decide which one to move forward on. When the world sort of exploded at the WWW conference held in Darmstadt Germany in 1995, Java officially 'won' and both Self and TCL were de-committed. (not canceled per-se but not getting any more funding either).

I like to think that all three languages benefited from the competition.
2 comments
pron 3318 days ago
I believe that much of the work Sun had done on Self found its way to Java in the form of HotSpot.
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hipitihop 3318 days ago
Not to take anything from Self, but in regards to HotSpot, a more accurate history attributes the lineage to Smalltalk and the Animorphic team. Some details here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSpot
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pron 3318 days ago
Right. Sun incorporated Animorphic's work into Self, and later purchased Animorphic and the technology became known as HotSpot.
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saurik 3318 days ago
Do you know what caused Java to "win" when the world exploded?
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ChuckMcM 3318 days ago
At the time it was the ability to construct executable content inside a web page. Javascript now dominates that space, but up until WWWC 2 pretty much everyone was stuck with page layout primitives. It made it possible to see a path to where we are today and so everyone wanted their browser to have it, and if their browser didn't have it they could run the HotJava browser and get it.

Bottom line, it demonstrated an answer to a problem that a lot of people were having, and it promised to answer that problem in an 'open source' kind of way.

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saurik 3318 days ago
OK: I was hoping it was going to be something to do with the design of the language as opposed to just to do with the implementation (as any of those languages could have been deployed for the web; especially so given my vague understanding that the web wasn't even Java's most original purpose). (Though I guess I can make up some reasons related to security models that would have been weirder to do in Self or TCL.)
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ChuckMcM 3318 days ago
A hard, and perhaps bitter, truth in programming languages is that, historically, elegance counts for nothing and applicability against current problems counts for everything.

I have no way of confirming the authenticity of the following, I read the whiteboard but anyone could have written it. On a whiteboard, in an office associated with Adele Goldberg where Parcplace Systems[1] had moved out, was penned the question; "What is the killer app for SmallTalk?" and below that in a different hand, was written, "and that is how the unholy love child between C++ and UCSD PASCAL wins."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adele_Goldberg_(computer_scien...

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