I remember reading that Guy Steele was specifically hired to the Java project for this reason. Wikipedia corroborates this: "In 1994, Steele joined Sun Microsy

I remember reading that Guy Steele was specifically hired to the Java project for this reason. Wikipedia corroborates this: "In 1994, Steele joined Sun Microsystems and was invited by Bill Joy to become a member of the Java team after the language had been designed, since he had a track record of writing good specifications for existing languages." He also documented ECMAScript 1, which I've found to be pleasurably precise.