>This also helped killing the Java role on the desktop and together with Microsoft, started the industry cycle to move back into AOT compiled languages.
Well, it's not like Java ever did much to win the Desktop. Swing was a horrible over-engineered mess, performance was crap until GC improved and CPUs caught on in the mid-late 00s, and the desktop saw mostly neglect from SUN.
>I wonder how it would have turned out if they had killed Objective-C instead
And have all OS X userland apps being written in Java? Probably Apple would have been dead.
Besides it's not like they killed Java among protests from developers -- the majority of developers and users "were quite happy to using Objective-C" as you said.
Well, it's not like Java ever did much to win the Desktop. Swing was a horrible over-engineered mess, performance was crap until GC improved and CPUs caught on in the mid-late 00s, and the desktop saw mostly neglect from SUN.
>I wonder how it would have turned out if they had killed Objective-C instead
And have all OS X userland apps being written in Java? Probably Apple would have been dead.
Besides it's not like they killed Java among protests from developers -- the majority of developers and users "were quite happy to using Objective-C" as you said.