[ncmncm]

What a shame it was that Gosling didn't understand C++ well enough even to crib from it.

I am astonished, again, whenever I am reminded of what he tried to copy and got horribly wrong, and what else he copied and should have known better than to. None of it would matter if Sun had not dumped a billion dollars into hyping it, so that later generations are now saddled with billions of lines of it.

What a cruel joke to play on posterity, a fitting companion to x86 ISA and BSD sockets.

[TheAceOfHearts]

Could you give some examples of things which you think were mistakenly copied, and things which should've been copied but were ignored?

[jcelerier]

they focused on C++ as an object-oriented programming language (as did, to be fair, mostly everyone in the 1990s since it was The Big Thing then) without seeing where C++'s real value is, which is :

- value types

- RAII idiom with exceptions

it's a big, coherent package, which means that you can write code so that e.g.

    my_type foo{whatever};

    file f{"/foo/bar", "w"};

    foo.do_stuff();
    f.write(foo);

and you can be assured that you won't have null pointers croppying left and right, much less "new" to write, your objects are always in a valid state, etc etc.

Java is the opposite: the whole object model revolves around the identity of objects, and thus any function that looks like `public string whatever()` can return null, you have to do manual cleanup of your resources most of the time everytime you use a type (closing files, streams, soundcards, etc etc), versus every time you define a type in C++.

[MaxBarraclough]

Nothing like a good C++ flamewar, but we already have a fine compilation of the case against the language - https://yosefk.com/c++fqa/

[nayuki]

Java is tremendously influenced by C and C++. Any experienced C++ programmer can learn Java easily because it has a similar syntax but a much simpler palette of language constructs.

I am glad that Java didn't copy these aspects of C and C++: https://www.nayuki.io/page/undefined-behavior-in-c-and-cplus... ; https://www.nayuki.io/page/near-duplicate-features-of-cplusp...

[astrange]

Undefined behavior is very useful, and Java doesn't replace it with anything better for high-performance CPU programming.

In particular, C loops can only be optimized because signed loop counters are assumed not to overflow. Java also doesn't have SIMD, and a very weak form of arrays as value types leads to pointer chasing.

[pjmlp]

And Objective-C, stuff like interfaces, resource bundles, lightweight metaclasses, APIs for distributed computing (J2EE was based on an internal OpenSTEP framework).