"Last year, I was invited to write an essay, to be included in a book on the occasion of Java’s 30th anniversary. The book never materialized, and I forgot about it.
So belatedly, for historians/archaeologists/pathologists: "
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It’s interesting that Bracha sees Java in the tradition of Smalltalk, whereas Gosling (the inventor of Java) states that the object model of Java comes directly from Simula 67, never mentioning Smalltalk at all, see https://youtu.be/ccRtIdlTqlU?t=2448.
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It seems to align with the conclusion that users define the language, how it is used, how they think about it. 
I’ve never really programmed in Java. I’ve done things with the type system and built my own unnecessary complexity on top of it. I think interfaces in Java are a nice solution for Java but, as with other similar languages, the language probably suffers from the kitchen sink, multi-paradigm, appeal to all approach it has taken.
I think you can probably say that all mature, still-evolving programming languages contain a small, consistent, maybe beautiful language buried deep underneath all the features.
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I never liked JAVA since it was not a open language. You can (last time I looked many years ago, before Linux came out)
only run it on who Sun Micro systems licenses the JAVA run time to. “RUN anywhere” to me
is not just Sun or Windows computers.
It used to be like that, but fortunately it has changed. See e.g. https://openjdk.org/.
Also IBM has been providing it’s implementations of Java for ages. The run anywhere, and insane backward compatibility, is kind of in the DNA of IBM’s mainframe brain.
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