[pletnes]

I was once at a talk given by James Gosling. He said that Java-the-language was «a trick to get C++ programmers to use the Java Virtual Machine». He deliberately made Java very similar to C++ but removed what he saw as the hard and risky parts (memory management, operator overloading, etc) that are typically not required for standard applications.

Well, that was my interpretation of what he said, errors are my own etc. But this would make Java a direct descendant of C++, in my mind.

[bhaak]

I have never heard that quote from James before. Are you sure about the JVM? The JVM was quite controversial back then, Java first had to prove that you could make a performant virtual machine.

But Guy Steele claimed "We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."

[pletnes]

Well, it’s many years ago and memory corruption is real. I got the impression that their goal was to get adoption of (what at some point became) the JVM, or the «compile once run anywhere» vision. They envisioned many languages to coexist on the JVM, which kinda happened but maybe not as much as they thought. So they designed a language to get started, Java, and made it familiar-looking to get people om board.