Much as people credit Sun's marketing for Java's success, I think it would have succeeded even without them. Java successfully brought garbage collection to the majority of working developers at the time who were all C and C++ developers. This was a huge step forward that solved a massive pain point. Today this is far less of a compelling argument since most languages are GC'd and C++ is far less dominant, but Java was the right language for the time.
There was another big factor, remember that ISO C++ initial release is from 1998 and while C was standardised in 1990, many compilers in the mid-90's were still catching up to it.
Then POSIX still left too room for each UNIX flavour to decide how to actually implement certain features, e.g. signal.
So Java, despite being initially interpreted felt like how portable code should be, coupled with a rich library.
I recall a quote from an anonymous industry heavyweight when Java came out (paraphrased now because I can't remember exactly where I saw it): "Thank goodness, now I don't have to learn C++."
> Java successfully brought garbage collection to the majority of working developers at the time who were all C and C++ developers.
Isn't this what people refer as marketing? Other languages were garbage collected before Java. Common Lisp and SML both existed a decade before Java. There was also Smalltalk and Eiffel, but for them I've heard that Java being free really helped (which may be called marketing or not, but is still related to Sun money in a way).
