Nothing would have prevented building a nice, lightweight system in Java in 2007 had one thrown away the conventions that had infested it at that point. Java's

Nothing would have prevented building a nice, lightweight system in Java in 2007 had one thrown away the conventions that had infested it at that point. Java's problem never was the language which has been as serviceable as any other since the JDK1.4 days. It is straightforward to compile (no metaprogramming, type erased generics), linking is delayed to runtime and dependencies are all precompiled to bytecode which _should_ make for very fast builds. The problems came from the multitude of Internet-bubble era tool vendors which overcomplicated everything in order to sell high priced "corporate-level" solutions and imposed that certain coding style. Java is still known for this today because it appears in so many vintage codebases and is still being applied by coders who never revised their practices from 22 years ago. My theory is that Rob Pike was jealous of Java because it has succeeded with a model similar to his own Inferno (bytecode, C syntax) and this aligned with Google's ask of developing something that would be outside of Sun's lawyers reach.