Comment by echelon

It's absolutely crazy that a game so popular - let alone any game - was originally written in Java.

Why did notch do that?

There were next to no libraries, ecosystem, or support for Java at the time. It was such a bizarre choice.

Not to mention the JVM, GC, and all the other oddities. It was super off the beaten path to have done this.

Might as well have been Ruby or Perl.