What’s funny is Java solved an issue that is pretty much non-existent in today’s environment: compatibility.
It’s much less like the Wild West these days. People have a clearer picture of what to support, how to support it, and generic tools to abstract platform-specific code.
I like Java. I think they did good things and had a pragmatic approach to the problems they were trying to solve.
But time goes on, and this young discipline progresses fast. It’ll be interesting to see decades from now what languages survive and which ones don’t.
I predict as time goes on, we’ll get fewer big languages (popular, widespread, useful, etc.) and they will stick around for much longer.
Kind of like human language, if you think about it.