That's my posting that was linked to. Of course, Java doesn't have dispatch. And it's also true that Gosling's team originally considered, then rejected, C++

That's my posting that was linked to. Of course, Java doesn't have dispatch. And it's also true that Gosling's team originally considered, then rejected, C++ in favor of building Oak. But Oak borrowed an awful lot directly from Obj-C, and only later underwent a lot of syntactical surgery (turning into Java) in order to "look" like C++ specifically to attract C++ programmers, even though it didn't feel like C++ at all. This is pretty well documented.