Java's verbosity made us all hate type systems in the early 2000s so many of us migrated to dynamic languages such as Python, Ruby in the mid 2000s that allowed us to work fast and loose and get things done.
This was actually a replay of what happened with Smalltalk versus C++ in the 80's and 90's, which was a part of the history of how Java came about. And even that was a replay of what happened with COBOL and very early "fourth generation" languages (like MANTIS) from a decade before that!
C++ is a utterly complex language. Java appeared as an option to simplify programming compared with all the bureaucracy of C++: no need to manage every bit of memory (GC), no multiple inheritance, no templates, no multi-platform hell, a big library included etc.
Smalltalk was not available to most programmers back then, it needed an expensive machine with a lot of memory and the implementations were very expensive. Apps were also much smaller, so the disadvantages of C were less pressing.
Smalltalk was not available to most programmers back then, it needed an expensive machine with a lot of memory
I was programming back then. It ran just fine on fairly standard commodity hardware from the time 486 stopped being "high end." Also, at one point the entire American Airlines reservations system was written in Smalltalk and running on 3 early 90's Power Mac workstations.
the implementations were very expensive.
More or less true. At one point there were $5k and $10k per-seat licenses.
Apps were also much smaller, so the disadvantages of C were less pressing.
There was a major DoD project that let defense analysts do down-to-the soldier simulations of entire strategic theaters. (So imagine this as an ultra-detailed, ultra realstic RTS.) They did this as a competition with 3 teams, one working in C++, one in another language I can't recall, and one in Smalltalk. The Smalltalk group was so far ahead of the other two, there was simply no question. That was a complex app. There were countless complex financial and logistics apps.
This was actually a replay of what happened with Smalltalk versus C++ in the 80's and 90's, which was a part of the history of how Java came about. And even that was a replay of what happened with COBOL and very early "fourth generation" languages (like MANTIS) from a decade before that!