Many of us in the 90's jumped into Java, in spite of its issues, because it made it more pleasing to write cross platform code, than using C or C++ with CORBA/COM across OSes with compilers that were still playing catchup with the standards.
I am still programming in java in my day job, knowing fully well that Java was not my top five language choices. Eiffel's type system was a bit more advanced than Java even way back in those days, so not only was I stuck without an ide till VA for Java showed up or VisuallJ++ I also had to accept weak inheritance and design by contract models. Performance of course was not even close to an Eiffel compiled C code, which was probably addressed in later versions of java.
My point being, that just as Eiffel was something that was better and set aside by a few leading development shops, there must have been other languages that could/should have received a fair share in language evaluation by programmers, I dont necessarily mean limiting to Ruby, Python for example, despite them being excellent tools, they may fall short in an enterprise ecosystem. What happened at least I seem to think instead is a sort of groupthink to start coding in Java because of rubbernecking. All in all, I think that things could have been better if people paused to understand the Java language model and fixed in java 1.2/3, or some earlier version so we didnt have to wait till Java 1.8 to get these features. /rant.
Before Java was known to the world, I already knew plenty of languages with closures, value types, GC,AOT compilation to native code, ...
But they all suffered from two problems, not being from known companies with geek credit and being commercial.
Java was from Sun (geek credit) and was free (as in beer), hence why it got adopted.
I think it would been great if Eiffel had got a decent market share,instead of just the DBC ideas.
But if I remember correctly they went after the enterprise, so the language was out of reach to many developers given what they used to charge for.