> Joy had the handicap of going first, and Java has some choices that reflect that.

As a sidenote: Microsoft actually willfully copied some of those to their side, too (e.g. covariant arrays).

Having worked with C++ (which has its own set of problems, of course), I repeatedly find language design decisions that strike me as inelegant hacks in both of them (getting rid of `const`, for example).

From today's perspective, I'd say that the biggest contribution both languages have made for the future are their respective runtimes and that they allow new languages to adopt those (Clojure, Scala, Kotlin, F#...) without having to throw away all of your codebase at once.