[praptak]

> had all the necessary bullet points to become what is Java now

The language itself was hacked together in a haphazard way. It didn't even have a formal grammar which I found out because it stopped us from creating some pretty important tooling for it.

Edit: I think there was a commercial company that offered a parser, which they created by tweaking a grammar until it got a high enough pass rate on megabytes of publicly available Delphi code.