Holy cow, that's my USENET posting. Will have to ask my sysadmin to record the HN spike. I do find it funny reading postings here basically saying that, regardless of what Patrick Naughton said, his language is actually based on C++. Those language creators have some nerve! :-) Reminds me of the Kurt Vonnegut scene in Back to School.

Even back in the '90s, when I wrote that as a wee PhD student, it was clear that Java was derivative of Obj-C (among others) much more than C++.

EDIT: all the Newton references in that passage are because it was posted in comp.sys.newton.misc (IIRC).