People I find underestimate how much thinking and engineering went into the Java Virtual Machine. The language isn't the most expressive, but VM knowledge and

People I find underestimate how much thinking and engineering went into the Java Virtual Machine. The language isn't the most expressive, but VM knowledge and technology in general grew massively from IBM and Sun's investment, and if you look at the papers in this list. The JVM also stood on the shoulders of giants (Guy Steele & LISP , David Ungar & Self, etc.)