[zozbot123]

> I can tell you first hand that when James Gosling was developing Oak/Greentalk which became Java, Pascal never came up ... the focus was much more on C++ and what to keep and what to discard.

The interesting thing is that at the time Java was released and then aggressively marketed by Sun, the AT&T folks had already come up with Limbo (the successor to Alef, and running on the Dis virtual machine), which was technically quite similar to the Java/JVM solution, and in some ways quite superior. But nobody ever mentions Limbo in connection with Java, or even with Go (which it - along with its predecessor Alef - was a clear influence on). History is written by the winners, and Java was a winning language/platform for quite some time.

[pjmlp]

Even here on HN, people bring up Plan 9 all the time, forgetting that Inferno and Limbo were actually the end of the road and Plan 9 just a middle step.