[jgneff]

I am also very grateful to James Gosling. I was working with C++ at Taligent (an Apple, IBM, and HP joint venture) in the fall of 1995 when I first downloaded Java to give it a try. I literally jumped up and down with joy after writing my first "Hello, World" program. It was such a breath of fresh air compared to the Taligent CommonPoint application framework we were building.

I took the severance package when Taligent imploded, dropped everything I was doing at the time, and have been working with Java and its related software ever since.

[fidotron]

I think it's incredible with hindsight how Java countered many of the mid 90s C++ problems, especially by avoiding multiple inheritance.

It remains a shame that it didn't launch with generics though, and I still think operator overloading would have been good. Had it done so I think a lot more people would have stuck around for when the performance improved with HotSpot.

[astrange]

> I think it's incredible with hindsight how Java countered many of the mid 90s C++ problems, especially by avoiding multiple inheritance.

This is because Java is based on an older language called Objective-C that doesn't have multiple inheritance :)

It's not based on C++, that's just the other OO language from the era people usually think of.

[fidotron]

> This is because Java is based on an older language called Objective-C that doesn't have multiple inheritance :)

No it's not, certainly not any more than it's "based" on Smalltalk.

[astrange]

https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html