🚀 go-pugleaf

Andrew Koenig wrote:
> 
> In article <4k7akk$nsh@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM> linden@positive.eng.sun.com (Peter van der Linden) writes:
> 
> > Andrew Koenig <ark@research.att.com> wrote:
> > >Of course, the head of Java marketing is expected to say things like this,
> > >whether or not the facts strictly justify them.
> 
> > Well Andrew, one could equally well say that a proponent, supporter,
> > and author of a book on  C++ would be expected to defend the C++ language
> > by saying something like this, regardless of whether it is borne out by
> > the evidence or not  ;-)
> 
> Of course.  You should always take people's biases into account
> when you evaluate what they say.

...yet even a biased person may say things that are worth listening to.

I agree with Andy. Java has a lot of marketing behind it.

Languages have not traditionally been the center of a lot of marketing attention.
C/C++, for example, was developed by AT&T which did NOT market them as a product.
Java, on the other hand, is the subject of major marketing efforts by Sun. There
are "Java days," for example, where Sun loads a circus tent with a thousand people
and provides free food. Thus, I don't find Java's popularity at all surprising. While
marketing people are not rigorously scientific, they are quite capable of producing
a large amount of talk/$ invested. Given the number of marketing dollars apparently
devoted to Java (and the lack of a competitor) I think Java's success is pretty
much in the "middle of the Bell curve" as a marketing effort.

I believe there are better comparisons than C/C++ and Java. There is precedent
for applying marketing to computer languges, however. Prolog (or the Japanese
5th generation computing initiative) and PL/1 got very expensive marketing campaigns
as well. These were all bombs.

Is it possible that Java will become the Prolog or PL/1 of the 90's?

Erik DeBenedictis