[zak_mc_kracken]

Not very convincing. Maybe Patrick Naughton was in love with Objective C but there is little of that left in Java.

Depending on which angle you look at, you could see Java's interfaces as a direct successor of Objective C's protocols or a simplification of C++' multiple inheritance.

If you were to believe James Gosling, it's clearly the latter that influenced Java's design. The fact that Naughton liked Objective C hasn't had much impact on what Java ended up looking like in 1995.

[w0utert]

Having programmed many, many lines of C++, Java and Objective-C, I'd have to agree. Maybe parts of Java were influenced by Objective-C, but surely there is very, very little left of the philosophy behind how you write Objective-C code. In fact, I'd say there's almost no similarity whatsoever.

In terms of how you program, Java is a lot more like C++, minus half the language features that make C++ both powerful and dangerous. Obviously there are fundamental differences, but I think it's pretty clear that someone switching from C++ to Java would have a much easier time adjusting, then going from C++ to Objective-C.

Also, I find the qualification of Objective-C as a 'mutant of C' a bit off the mark. Yes, Objective-C is a superset of C, it's built on exactly the same foundation, but the end result is and how you use it is completely different in almost everything except the syntax of the pure C-constructs and fundamental types.

[tragomaskhalos]

The fact that class methods are not polymorphic is a dead giveaway that Java's heritage is more C++ than Smalltalk/Obj-C.

[jayvanguard]

I'd put that more around 1997-8. Java 1.0 and 1.1 definitely felt a lot more like programming objective-c both in terms of the features available and the style the community developed in. Somewhere in the Java 1.2-1.5 things changed considerably. I agree that by then it felt way more like C++ than Objective-C.