A counterpoint to this post from my colleague Sam.

It’s not technical. Languages don’t succeed for technical reasons. If this were true we’d all be programming in Lisp and Smalltalk. Java became popular by riding the internet (specifically the web) wave. .Net became popular because Microsoft have billions of dollars to spend on marketing. Both of these platforms have something in common – they are aggressively marketed by a big industry name.

Write once, run anywhere. Sun coined the term, and successfully won the mindshare. Developers working in Lisp & Smalltalk wondered what was so special about that.

Garbage collection. Most work in garbage collection was done in the 70’s and 80’s (possibly even earlier – Lisp has been around since the 60’s). Again marketed heavily by Sun, while the aforementioned Lisp and Smalltalk programmers looked on nonplussed.

Lisp didn’t take over the world because (to my knowledge) there was no big name vendor marketing it, and everyone outside the Lisp community thought it was just for AI.

Smalltalk didn’t take over the world because of infighting between vendors, and a failure to see the threat of Java. They were too busy competing with each other to notice that Java was about to swamp all of them.

Having said that, there are places where Smalltalk and Lisp are thriving, and those companies are more than happy for everyone else to remain distracted by Java and .Net while they consistently outperform them in time-to-market of new features.