by DonHopkins | 2025-10-10 12:52:30+00:00
At least Python doesn't have an extremist "100% Pure" ideology like Java, and instead (like TCL and Lua) it's been designed from the ground up for easily integrating with other languages and libraries, embedding, and extending, instead of Java's intolerantly weaponized purity and linguistic supremacy.

Reasons why Sun and Java failed:

Strategy over product. McNealy cast Java as a weapon of mass destruction to fight Microsoft, urging developers to "evangelize Java to fight Microsoft." That fight-first framing made anti-Microsoft positioning the goal line, not developer throughput.

Purity over pragmatism. Sun’s "100% Pure Java" program explicitly banned native methods and dependencies outside the core APIs. In practice, that discouraged bridges to real-world stacks and punished teams that needed COM/OS integration to ship. (Rule 1: "Use no native methods.")

"100% Pure Java" has got to be one of the worst marketing slogans in the history of programming languages, signaling absolutism, exclusion, and gatekeeping. And it was technically just as terrible and destructive an idea that held Java back from its potential as an inclusive integration, extension, and scripting language (especially in the web browser context, since it was so difficult to integrate, that JavaScript happened instead and in spite of Java).

Lua, Python, and even TCL were so much better and successful at embedding and extending applications than Java ever was (or still is), largely because they EMBRACED integration and REJECTED "purity".

Java's extremist ideological quest for 100% purity made it less inclusive and resilient than "mongrel" languages and frameworks like Lua, Python, TCL, SWIG, and Microsoft COM (which Mozilla even cloned as "XP/COM"), that all purposefully enabled easy miscegenation with existing platforms and libraries and APIs instead of insanely insisting everyone in the world rewrite all their code in "100% Pure Java".

That horrible historically troubling slogan was not just a terrible idea technically and pragmatically, but it it also evoked U.S. nativist/KKK's "100% Americanism", Nazi's "rassische Reinheit", "Reinhaltung des Blutes", and "Rassenhygiene", Fascist Italy's "La Difesa della Razza", and white supremacist's "white purity". It's no wonder Scott McNealy is such a huge Trump supporter!

While Microsoft courted integrators. Redmond pushed J/Direct / Java-COM paths, signaling "use Windows features from Java if that helps you deliver." That practicality siphoned off devs who valued getting stuff done over ideological portability.

Community as militia. The rhetoric ("fight," "evangelize") enlisted developers as a political army to defend portability, instead of equipping them with first-rate tooling and sanctioned interop. The result: cultural gatekeeping around "purity" rather than unblocking use cases.

Ecosystem costs. Tooling leadership slid to IBM’s aptly named Eclipse (a ~$40M code drop that became the default IDE), while Sun’s own tools never matched Eclipse’s pull: classic opportunity cost of campaigning instead of productizing.

IBM's Eclipse cast a dark shadow over Sun's "shining" IDE efforts, which could not even hold a candle to Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE that Sun reflexively criticized so much without actually bothering to use and understand the enemy.

At least Microsoft and IBM had the humility to use and learn from their competitor's tools, in the pursuit of improving their own. Sun just proudly banned them from the building, cock-sure there was nothing to learn from them. And now we are all using polyglot VSCode and Cursor, thanks to Microsoft, instead of anything "100% Pure" from Sun!

Litigation drain. Years of legal trench warfare (1997 suit and 2001 settlement; then the 2004 $1.6B peace deal) defended "100% Pure Java" but soaked time, money, and mindshare that could have gone to developer-facing capabilities.

Optics that aged poorly. The very language of "purity" in "100% Pure Java" read as ideological and exclusionary to many -- whatever Sun's presumed intent -- especially when it meant "rewrite in Java, don’t integrate." The cookbook literally codified "no native methods," "no external libraries," and even flagged Runtime.exec as generally impure.

McNealy’s self-aggrandizing war posture did promote Java’s cross-platform ideal, but it de-prioritized developer pragmatism -- stigmatizing interop, slow-rolling mixed-language workflows, and ceding tools leadership -- while burning years on lawsuits. If your priority was "ship value fast," Sun’s purity line often put you on the wrong side of the border wall.

And now finally, all of Java's remaining technical, ideological, and entrenched legacy enterprise advantages don't matter any more, alas, because they are all overshadowed by the unanthropomorphizable lawnmower that now owns it and drives it towards the singular goal of extracting as much profit from it as possible.