I've been out of grad school for a bit now, but 10 years ago is about right. There were a lot of things being published about compilers that might have well been direct ports of papers written in the 70s, "now for JITs." And honestly, if you read some of those papers from the 70s about automatic parallelization and such, it was pretty freakin' cool. And there were memory guarantees in Fortran that were not present in C that made it non-applicable. Java had most/all of those guarantees, which is what I think brought about their revival. That's probably not the whole explanation, as I'm not sure why it took Java so long (these were 2010+ papers, 15+ years after Java came out).