We might be agreeing here already, but my understanding was that the mindset Java fought against -- and finally won -- was: Interpreted, garbage-collected langu

We might be agreeing here already, but my understanding was that the mindset Java fought against -- and finally won -- was: Interpreted, garbage-collected languages, or basically anything with a substantial runtime component, will be too slow and unpredictable to use in serious production environments. So Java went all-out with (1) a static type system and basic language features that C++ coders could respect, (2) a level of hype and corporate sponsorship/support that PHBs could respect, (3) a portable, eventually fast VM, opening up some nice deployment options. There was no need to introduce really exciting language features, only to keep promoting the OOP concepts that C++ thought-leaders were so enthusiastic about at the time.