On 2009-09-30 07:16 -0600 (Wed), John A. De Goes wrote:
The cross-platform features have been extremely important to the success of Java....
Moreover, the importance of cross-platform libraries on the Java platform is evinced by the fact that developers of major native libraries _always_ make their libraries cross-platform....
Hm. It is interesting to note, then, that Ruby, which has worse
cross-platform support than Haskell[1], is yet still quite popular,
orders of magnitude more so than Haskell.
So while that portability may have helped Java, it doesn't seem required
to become popular.
[1] I've ported a fair amount of both Ruby and Haskell code from Unix
to Windows, so I think I have a pretty good handle on the the relative
portability of both.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson