Title: I&#x27;m trying to get a deeper understanding of how Java actually exploded into the mainstream &quot;enterprise&quot; and has continued to do so at least since the early 2000s. As a regular browser of HN, I&#x27;ve stumbled upon different flavors of commentary related to this in an ad-hoc fashion; some snarky like &quot;Oh you know, it&#x27;s a dumb-proof language that really doesn&#x27;t require people to have had a solid foundation in CS so hiring and ramp-up are easier&quot; and some more insightful like &quot;It&#x27;s not really Java the language, but Java the ecosystem (like JEE) and particularly the JVM that makes it an attractive proposition for enterprise companies&quot;. I&#x27;m wondering how much of this proliferation can be attributed to:<p>1. Features. Core functionality that the language&#x2F;ecosystem provides like the JVM, portability, relative ease in multi-threaded programming, garbage collection etc)
2. Timing. Was there a specific problem during the late 90s or early 2000s that was a sweet spot for solving using Java? Seeing that this was around the time when the internet really became mainstream, was Java primed to benefit from this in a way that set it apart from the then-contemporary programming ecosytems?
3. Scalability. In terms of the number of people you can hire while &quot;growing&quot; your company; could the popularity of SOA&#x2F;WebServices fueled this as well?<p>Disclaimer: I&#x27;m not generalizing that every &quot;big&quot; company uses Java and I&#x27;m not saying that the ones that do are obviously doing it for the right reasons; I&#x27;m purely looking at this from academic interest since there&#x27;s so much rich nuanced history that I feel I don&#x27;t understand. Such a discussion could be easily extended to ask &quot;What does this mean for functional programming languages based on the JVM like Clojure and Scala&quot;. Like Mark Twain said: &quot;History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.&quot;
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