>Not too appealing to have to install that much crap on one's system just to play with a new language.
Ironically, this is what I thought about C# and Visual Studio when I used it 20 years ago. Boo was much easier to get started with back then, when you just wanted to try out .NET 2.0. It took me a few minutes to download and install .NET Framework (~20 MB) and SharpDevelop (~15 MB) versus five CDs of Visual Studio 2002 which took an hour or so to install on the machines of that time. And yes, I already skipped the installation of the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) documentation which as far as I remember already took an hour alone.
For some reason the installation of a development environment for Java was also much easier than Visual Studio, i.e. one had to download Java Runtime Environment (~100 MB) and unpack it, and then download Eclipse IDE (~100 MB) and unpack it. When you downloaded both archive files already it took a few seconds to unpack it and double-click on the eclipse.exe.
>Not too appealing to have to install that much crap on one's system just to play with a new language.
Ironically, this is what I thought about C# and Visual Studio when I used it 20 years ago. Boo was much easier to get started with back then, when you just wanted to try out .NET 2.0. It took me a few minutes to download and install .NET Framework (~20 MB) and SharpDevelop (~15 MB) versus five CDs of Visual Studio 2002 which took an hour or so to install on the machines of that time. And yes, I already skipped the installation of the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) documentation which as far as I remember already took an hour alone.
For some reason the installation of a development environment for Java was also much easier than Visual Studio, i.e. one had to download Java Runtime Environment (~100 MB) and unpack it, and then download Eclipse IDE (~100 MB) and unpack it. When you downloaded both archive files already it took a few seconds to unpack it and double-click on the eclipse.exe.