[StevePerkins]

Speaking as someone who has made their career with Java, "what the JVM ought to have been" is marketed for server-side use from the beginning.

It was poorly suited for the browser from the earliest days, and even now the language and runtime have evolved to make it a round peg for that square hole no matter how WASM develops.

Yet because students and younger webdevs see it through the prism of trying to be a browser-side solution, it taints the brand for people who lack business application experience. Java is thought of as "insecure", even though the OVERWHELMING majority of security patches are for the browser applet plugin, which hasn't been widely used in twenty years and now being retired. Instead of being "a thing that makes large-scale business server applications more performant, and more tenable for large teams to work on", it is often seen by newbies as "a failed React.js alternative" where it comes up short.

Actual Java developers stopped thinking of it that way decades ago, but the history unfortunately persists.

[fulafel]

Java in the beginning was standaline on the client side too. The web browser plugin came post 1.0 and the pre 1.0 (Oak) target applications were more IoT, not web