[karim]

Absolutely. Java was the first mainstream language with automatic memory management and garbage collection. You have to remember that before that people were building line of business applications in C or C++.

Java made it possible for average engineers to turn out relatively reliable applications, in a fraction of the time it'd have taken them with any other option (apart from Smalltalk but it was already niche by then).

[blendo]

Also, Java’s JDBC was hugely helpful in standardizing sql/rdbms database access for enterprise programmers.

[fishmaster]

> Java was the first mainstream language with automatic memory management and garbage collection

Wouldn't this be Lisp?

[kazinator]

No, no. Mainstream is actually a stream in Scotland, pronounced a lot like "mine stream", and also the name of the surrounding region and a village therein. The programmers living in Mainstream are True Scotsmen, and the first garbage collected language that these True Scotsman Mainstream programmers used was in fact Java.