Java is a clever combination of features that have been taken from older languages and adapted to the needs of Java:
basic object-orientation and many syntactic features from C++,
interfaces (as opposed to implementations) from Modula-2, Ada, IDL (used in DCE, COM, CORBA),
"byte code" / "virtual machine" from Pascal P-code,
absence of an explicit pointer notion from Oberon, ...
garbage collection from LISP/Smalltalk/Oberon/...,
threads from existing C/C++ libraries ...,
. . .
Java is easier to use than C++, and above all: it is portable, WEB-oriented, and provides an ever growing wealth of class libraries for ever new application domains.
Last but not least, a clever marketing strategy has prepared the ground for Java's extraordinary success: Sun Microsystems has thrown it on the market in a rather early stage, even though for certain basic features, like event handling, a satisfactory final solution had not yet been found . (Event handling has been revised in JDK1.1, and Microsoft has offered still another solution in J++. Lava provides a fourth solution for event handling since we have not been content with any of the three Java solutions.)
The combination of features that Java has adopted from older languages makes Java a very useable and useful language.
But there remain many problems that havn't been addressed at all by Java and older languages, or that havn't found a really satisfactory solution, and therefore we believe that Java isn't the "ultimate programming language" after which it makes no sense to reflect upon better solutions.
Particularly the enormous popularity of the Visual Basic programming environment (in spite of the antediluvian character of the Basic language and in spite of the existence of Java) proves that there is more behind the success of a language than its abstract conceptual structure, its portability, or the wealth of useful libraries that are available for it.