I think a schism existed between the C++ community, which was still focused on language issues, and the other prominent development communities, which pretty much left the language alone. Java already had exceptions, but didn't have templates and had nothing like the STL. Yet the Java community focused on writing a whole bunch of libraries that everybody can assume will exist everywhere, libraries that will let you  write applications really quickly. The end result is, we have templates in C++, but there's no way to write user interfaces or talk to  databases. Java has no templates, but you can write user interfaces up the wazoo and you can talk to databases with no trouble at all.

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