I don't mean Java was perfect from day one and forevermore. I mean it was the language that was perfectly dominant and acceptable at the time, and could've been extended and kept backwards-compatible, rather than restarting new languages from scratch.

JavaScript is particularly hideous, and was cobbled together over a weekend, and because of that misstep the industry got stuck with it and had to invent TypeScript to "fix it" and create something tolerable in the modern world.

> I don't mean Java was perfect from day one and forevermore.

Neither do I. My point was that your comment didn't use any features specific to Java, so if you replaced "Java" with literally any other language you'd have the exact same argument. The details you added here like that it was "perfectly dominant and acceptable" help in that regard (not that I agree with where you're going), but your original comment would have been equally valid with literally any programming language.

> I mean it was the language that was perfectly dominant and acceptable at the time

No. Java never was what you're claiming.

If you don't think Java was ever dominant (and frankly I think it still is), then probably we just disagree about the definition of the word "dominant".

It was a dominant language. But you said "perfectly dominant", which I took to mean "the one dominant language". Java was not that - not overwhelmingly more popular than C++, for instance.

Java was perfectly dominant in it's realm only. Obviously Java is not competing in the realm of machine code generation at all, and assembly language should always exist too.

C/C++ is the perfect example of a language lasting multiple decades without each new generation trying to throw it all out and start from scratch, but simply evolving it.