[FigBug]

I think Java was unique as it was the first language with a major corporation behind it and a large marketing campaign.

[taffer]

That was COBOL with Univac, IBM and Honeywell.

[dredmorbius]

Single platform (OS360 / zSeries/zOS).

Java is (famously) multi-platform. As disputed by Sun and Microsoft.

[kgwgk]

What about VisualBasic, for example? Or ObjectPascal/Delphi. Or Objective-C.

[dehrmann]

Objective C didn't have a major corporation behind it until 2006-2009. Apple wasn't really relevant (outside the iPod/iTunes) until OS X gained traction and the iPhone (and app store) came out.

[kgwgk]

Apple was not a major corporation in 2000? (But it's true that would be post-Java.) Then neither was Sun. (Or maybe FigBug meant IBM which pushed Java heavily a few years later? They also pushed Smalltalk before, by the way.)

[pjmlp]

In 1994 Apple was about to go insolvent after failing multiple times to create a next generation OS, and spending the remaing money acquiring NeXT, which happened to be a reverse acquisition in the end.

[kgwgk]

What do you consider a major corporation? In (fiscal year) 1997 when it merged with Next and started to push objective-c the company had $7bn in revenue (down from $11bn a couple of years before, that’s true) and more than 8000 employees. The next couple of years sales were around $6bn but increased to $8bn in 2000.

[pjmlp]

Right, but had not Steve Jobs "bought" Apple back, and we probably wouldn't be speaking about it anymore.

It would have turned into another Commodore, Atari, SGI, DEC,...