[trealira]

I wasn't around for it, but didn't C grow fast during the 70s and 80s?

And didn't Java and JavaScript also spread pretty fast? Of course, Java was explicitly promoted and advertised by Sun, and JavaScript played off of Java's popularity and later became a web standard.

[kibwen]

C was definitely a player in the 70s and 80s (when it (and Unix) still had a lot of healthy competition), but it didn't attain its current veneer of ubiquity until approximately the early 90s (after being standardized in 1989). Javascript was derided as a joke until 2009 brought ECMAScript 5 and Node.js. Java's rise was relatively fast, but Java also had the benefit of the most concerted corporate ad campaign in the history of programming languages (how many programming languages have you seen advertised on TV? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpirOZe1Cgk )

[pjmlp]

Regarding Java, it also helped that big Smalltalk players like IBM, decided to fully pivot into Java, and many Oracle haters might not realise that alongside IBM, they were the first ones to have alternative JVMs and were together with Sun in the Network Computer effort.

Smalltalk had a .NET like role in OS/2, one of the reasons SOM even supported metaclasses, just imagine the alternative universe.

[samus]

JavaScript was a web standard right from the beginning. Its popularity grew together with the web itself by virtue of being the only programming language that could be counted on to be available on websites.

Flash and Java both required plugins, didn't integrate well with the rest of the website, were quite heavyweight, and frequently got bad publicity due to security bugs.

Of course, browsers themselves also had them aplenty, but at the end of the day one can't use the internet without one :)

[p4ul]

This is exactly right! I believe C's popularity grew so quickly because of its correlation with the popularity of Unix and its descendants. And yes, Sun pushing Java very hard certainly grew its adoption.

JavaScript is a really interesting case; initially, I don't think it was really taken very seriously. It was mostly tolerated because of its privileged status as part of the web platform. But since so much has moved from desktop application to the browser, that privileged status has proven all the more valuable!

[tialaramex]

> with the popularity of Unix and its descendants

and with that the Internet. In 1990 UK higher education sites had "high speed" (megabit sometimes!) networking but they used X.25 "Coloured Book" protocols. There were a handful of well developed applications for services such as email, but experimenting with novel software on X.25 was difficult. In 1991 JANET (the people providing these network services to Universities, then and now) began JIPS, an experiment to try out Internet protocols.

Enthusiasm for JIPS was enormous. You could buy or, since you have an electronics department and an essentially inexhaustible supply of nerds, build, a Unix computer, and just like, write your own BSD sockets software. I hear a guy over a CERN has invented a World Wide Web we should check out... In less than a year JIPS ceased to be an "experiment" and by the time I arrived at a University a few years later X.25 was deprecated and few people cared that it was still technically available somewhere.

[pjmlp]

Not at all, it was only relevant to UNIX users.