| Thanks for that interview; very interesting, and I also appreciate your words for Scheme. For HN, I'd like to point out that it was a historical accident that Java looked like it did, as far as the Web was concerned. IIRC, Java looked like it did to appeal to technical and shrinkwrap developers, who were using C++ or C. (When I was lucky to first see Java, then called Oak, they said it was for embedded systems development for TV set-top boxes. I didn't see Java applets until a little later.) But the Web at the time was intended to be democratizing/inclusive (like BASIC, HyperCard, and Python). And the majority of the professional side was closer to what used to be called "MIS" development (such as 4GLs, but not C/C++). And in practice, HTML-generating application backends at the time were mostly written in languages other than C/C++. I'm sympathetic to the rebranding of the glue language for Java applets (and for small bits of dynamic), to be named like, and look like, Java. That made sense at the time, when we thought Java was going to be big for Web frontend (and I liked the HotJava story for a thin-client browser extended on-demand with multimedia content handlers). And before the browser changed from hypertext navigator to GUI toolkit. But it's funny that we're all using C-descendant syntax only through a series of historical accidents, when that wasn't even what the programmers at punctuated points in its adoption actually used (we only thought it would be, at the time the decisions were made). |