> <i>Hard as it may be to imagine, there was a time when Java was brand new and exciting. Long before it became the vast clunky back-end leviathan it is today, it was going to be the ubiquitous graphical platform that would be used on everything from cell phones to supercomputers: write once, run anywhere.</i><p>> <i>Initially I drank the kool-aid and was thrilled about this new “modern” language that was going to take over the world, and drooled at the notion of Java-based computers, containing Java chips that could run java byte-code as their native machine code.</i><p>Exactly. I was lucky to see Java when it was still called Oak, and then I developed some of the first (non-animation) Java applets and small desktop applications outside of Sun/JavaSoft. It was very exciting (speaking as a programmer in C, C++, Smalltalk, a little Self, a little Lisp, and other languages at the time). The language itself wasn't as cool as Lisp or Smalltalk, but it was a nice halfway compromise from C++, with some of its own less exotic but nice features and ergonomics. It was already in the browsers, had next-gen embedded systems for the Internet at the forefront from the beginning, there was a proof-of-concept of a better kind of Web browser using it, Sun putting even putting it in rings for ubiquitous computing, there were thin clients that could get interesting (combined with Sun's "The Network Is The Computer", even if historically techies didn't like underpowered diskless workstations, except to give to non-techies), etc., and it only promised to get better...<p>Then I turned my back for a sec., and the next time I looked, Java had been kicked out of the browser, and most all of the energy (except for the Android gambit) seemed to be focused on pitching Java for corporate internal software development. And suddenly no one else seemed to want to touch it, even if there wasn't much better. (Python, for example, from the same era, was one person's simplified <i>end user extension</i> language; and not intended for application development.)<p>Yet another case of technology adoption not going how you'd initially think it would.