> History has shown that is not always technical superiority that wins, but
> marketing and perceptions.  While Java may be mediocre, it is an
integrated
> concept that meets the perceived need for portable software solutions and
> utilizes the existing software knowledge base.
>
While we are talking about history, my 0.02...
In the 80's, a lot of various small computers were marketed. This triggered
a need for applications that would run on all of them, but languages failed
to provide enough portability to make this goal achievable. Due to this
failure of standardization at software level, the standardization happened
at hardware level - the PC.

The exact same process is happening again. There is a need for
cross-platforms applications, and since languages are still unable to be
really portable, we see the standardization happening at (virtual) hardware
level: the JVM.

Of course, when I talk about non-portable languages here, I do not include
Ada... Actually, I think that one of the virtues of Ada is that it allows
*several kinds* of portability: i.e. "do exactly the same thing on all
machines", or "make best use of the features of the machine you're running
on".
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           J-P. Rosen ([log in to unmask])
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