Yes, but there were several waiting in the wings. In the early '90s lots of people were expecting a GCed language - Smalltalk or Dylan or Self or CL or ML or ..

Yes, but there were several waiting in the wings. In the early '90s lots of people were expecting a GCed language - Smalltalk or Dylan or Self or CL or ML or ... - to make the breakthrough and become a mainstream application-programming language. Many of them (including Bill Joy) were pretty unhappy when it turned out to be Java that made it big.