Programming languages rarely die, but that doesn’t mean they all deserve new projects. Languages are born from specific problems—so what happens when those problems have long been solved?

A nostalgic look at Java’s revolutionary impact in 1995 and its transformation of software development—from portable bytecode to open source culture—and why, despite all its contributions, it feels like a language that never learned when to gracefully exit the stage.

A journey through four generations of programming languages—from procedural C to modern Go and Rust—exploring how each solved the problems of its predecessors while introducing new tradeoffs in memory management, performance, and developer experience.