[geodel]

And Java was designed for toasters. But enough people worked on it made it one of the most popular general purpose language of all times. A lot of folks do not have time to evaluate most appropriate language for a given task at hand and they would rather write code for their needs in a general purpose language and be done with it.

[willtim]

Sure they tried to make it work. But it did create a static typing and OOP backlash. IMHO, too many of us succumbed to the marketing. Many would have been better off using OCaml or Python, both of which were released about the same time (and OCaml has always shipped with "generics"!).