[lispm]

Gosling was an expert Lisper? I only heard that he developed a strange/tiny Lisp variant called Mocklisp as extension language for his Emacs editor.

> Design doesn't live in a vacuum.

Java was designed as a modernized/slim replacement for C++ when developing set-top boxes and PDAs. What SUN took from Lisp and Smalltalk in some limited form was the runtime: managed runtime with GC, code loading, typed objects and a virtual machine. VMs were thought as an advantage on machines with little memory, because of compact code representations. Various Lisps and also Smalltalk had that. But that was mostly it. The language level wasn't influenced by Lisp at all: no Lisp syntax, no Evaluator, no lambdas, no code-as-data, no macros, no support for functional programming, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_(programming_language)

[pron]

That's precisely the point. Watch the talks I linked to. Gosling presents Java's design as a wolf in sheep's clothing. They figured that the features most important in Lisp and Smalltalk are memory safety, GC, dynamic linking and reflection, shoved all of them into the JVM, and wrapped them in a non-threatening language that could actually gain significant traction. They did that because they realized that the linguistic features are not where most of the power lies. That's what good design looks like: you hide the power in a palatable package.