> Java may be used a lot, but so is Windows. It's an accident of history, of early adoption and network effects, rather than being inherently good technology.

Going on a tangent: Windows is an interesting example to bring up, because the Windows versions everyone uses today have about as much to do with the 'accident of history / early adoption' versions that were based on DOS as using Wine on Linux has.

It would perhaps be like today's JVM being register based, when the first version were stack based.

I don't actually know how much the JVM has changed over time.