Second Life might not be as universally successful as originally envisioned but it is still going 20 years later and land indeed still sells for thousands of US$ in certain popular locations so it is actually a pretty bad example of hype that was completely baseless, it was just over-hyped, not like current hype cycles that are pretty much 100% bullshit like cryptocurrencies, the Hyperloop, self driving cars or AI replacing workers.
Yes, I have Java and love Rust but the point is that if you say they all go through the same cycle there need to be some commonalities between the languages and the way they rise to popularity and there just aren't. If any modern language resembles Java's rise to popularity it would be Go.
Python isn't really strict enough to be a good learning language and Java has too much accidental complexity that literally matters in no other language.
it succeeded in holding back the entire field of programming for a decade via that mindset by having people blindly apply stupid Java design patterns to everything.
Java is nothing like Rust. Java was always sold as a low skill programmer language, Rust has a steep learning curve. Java tooling has always sucked where Rust has excellent tooling pretty much since 1.0, Java is extremely verbose and needs a lot of tools to generate code to be productive at all, Rust is very expressive and most people write the code by hand or just use built-in language features. Java has a culture of "who care about that backtrace in my log as long as the app does what it is supposed to" while Rust has a culture that very much cares about correctness more than performance. Java was always driven by CEOs pushing it on people from the top while Rust is very much a language programmers try to push into their companies from the bottom.
Also, none of the languages you listed have a very particular niche that differs from what they were used early on apart from Java which is now mostly used on the server and used to also be used in GUI applications more.
Also consider that the same idiot decision makers have been happily applying Factory-management methods to knowledge workers for decades without noticing how badly that works.
I sort of assumed that would be the case with cryptocurrencies too considering it is 100% scams but so far I am still waiting. And AI has far higher chances to convince idiot CEOs than cryptocurrencies ever had.
But sometimes when you leave people alone with their struggles they end up losing against those urges.
And nobody said that the production of child pornography should be legalized, though even talking about this reveals that we apparently don't make a linguistic distinction between material that essentially requires sexual abuse of children to produce and material that requires nothing more than some art supplies and artistic skill. That is the part that I consider disgusting, that we apparently dislike it so much that we forget all about the actual harm the production of some of it does to actual children in our efforts to use euphemistic language to avoid thinking about it too much. It feels like the emotional comfort of those taking part in the public discourse about it is more important than actually solving the problem for the victims.
My objective is the minimisation of harm. If someone uses artwork and that means that they will never touch an underage person then that is a good thing even though I may not like it.
I have never understood why we persecute and prosecute seemingly without taking this into account at all and treat someone with pedophile urges who never acted on them the same way as we treat someone who looked at drawn images and both of those the same was as someone who looks at actual images of real children being abused or someone who actively abuses children.
If anything we should try to offer the first two help in their attempts to never let their urges affect any real, existing children.
However a lot of the time it feels more like our society is designed to achieve the opposite in its active hostility to people who want to live their lives largely in places where they won't encounter children.
My point was mostly aimed at the people who view the constitution and constitutional rights as some quasi-mystical concept, similar to the one underpinning stupid phrasings like "natural rights" or "god-given rights" that also ignore that rights only exist because we, as human societies, decided to put effort into creating and enforcing them.
This seems to be more common in the US along with the quasi-mystical view of the founding fathers, the office of the president and the supreme court among other things. Possibly because a lot of those things have been around for too long for people to remember a time before they existed.
the people that know better work around you instead.
In fact one of the ways to work around you that causes the least friction is usually to just get you promoted away from the places where you can do the most direct damage in the area other people on a similar level to you care about.
A whole lot of useful stuff that wasn't publicly labelled AI got relabeled to take advantage of funding opportunities. That doesn't mean it is related to generative AI like LLMs and image generators though.
Second Life might not be as universally successful as originally envisioned but it is still going 20 years later and land indeed still sells for thousands of US$ in certain popular locations so it is actually a pretty bad example of hype that was completely baseless, it was just over-hyped, not like current hype cycles that are pretty much 100% bullshit like cryptocurrencies, the Hyperloop, self driving cars or AI replacing workers.