For Java I would suggest "Lisp is too powerful for Joe Programmer, and parentheses are scary"
Java as essentially Lisp's bastard child is I think undermentioned in language history.
Java as essentially Lisp's bastard child is I think undermentioned in language history.
"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."
- Guy Steele, Java spec co-author
Reasonably original-ish source: http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m....
Relative to C++, Java is actually a lot like Lisp. Don't forget that objects are a poor man's closures (and vice versa).
Dragging out that quote doesn't really answer the question. What about Java makes it like Lisp? The ability to (painfully) implement closures with objects and vice-versa? That's also shared with every other OO language, includes ones that would not normally be considered Lisp-influenced.
Anyway, the context is explicitly Java vs C++, not Smalltalk or Ruby or Python. I imagine if Smalltalk were the dominant platform this would've turned out differently. So let's do a compare and contrast.
Java has the following properties: methods are all virtual; single inheritance; inheritance isn't public/private; final instead of const; GC and references w/o memory alloc or pointers; a package system exists; generics instead of templates; no operator overloading. And Java 6 does have a limited form of closures, believe it or not-- you can access a variable declared as final with an anonymous inner class.
None of that is true of C++, and just about all of those substantially increase the complexity of the language. I don't even like Java, mind you, but after reading Effective C++ the influence of higher-level languages like Lisp was pretty obvious to me, even if Lisp might not have been the only or even primary influence on Java.
Actually, looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_language... it turns out a lot of languages with the properties I'm describing came before Java, so while Java clearly descends from Lisp in a lot of ways, the connection isn't as direct as I was imagining.
1) Garbage collection
2) Dynamic typing
3) No distinction between primitive values and general values - a value can be used everywhere
4) Lexical closures and higher-order functions
5) A hygienic macro system
6) First-class continuations
7) Space safety guarantees for tail calls ('tail call optimization')
8) A numeric tower
9) S-expression syntax
10) A focus on cons cells and lists as primitive data structures
There's probably something I'm missing, but the only feature that Java shares is the first.
In fact, his classic talk "Growing a Language" is among other things a very polite and implicit, but devastating critique of the design of Java.