[hermanhermitage]

Yes a very interesting point. You could even replace C in that sentence with Algol and it rings fairly true.

In C it always feels like the pillars were speed of implementation and speed of execution on low cost hardware and without sophisticated compilation technology.

Ignoring syntactic issues there are only a few things I wish it had as part of the specification (when viewing it as a (if used in a certain manner) portable minimum viable language where assembly language meets high level languages):

1. A better implementation of Landin's J operator than setjmp 2. Compile, Link, and Load time reflection 3. Portable dynamic code generation (at runtime) operators (to allow late binding and JIT style optimization).

Java can be also viewed as a reworking of Algol but this time with design pillars centred on working in a VM, modularity for large code bases and simplification principles.

It always feels to me like the simplification was intended to reduce complexity (originally: signed ints, no function pointers, no lambda, no manually managed memory objects) but unfortunately this has just pushed huge complexity into code bases. Whilst I can accept this in C (minimum viable human readable and writable portable code), for some reason because Java sits on a huge stack of runtime code and tooling I dont like it. What Java did really bring to the mainstream is the whole VM thing (although some of us will remember BCPL or UCSD p-code), but I think the VM brings too much Java-ism into it and a smaller and better VM lies within.