1994 blog post: "java.lang: A New Kind Of System Interface"
It isn't only Java, bytecode as execution format goes all the way back to late 1950's, Gosling quite clearly asserts the work that Java builds upon, contrary to the WebAssembly folks.
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1017013
"Back when I was a grad student at Carnegie Mellon, I had this problem where I needed to have some kind of an architecture-neutral distribution format. We had a bunch of workstations called PERQ machines. The folks who built them were a bunch of hardware guys who didn’t want to do software. The only compiler that they could get for free was UCSD (University of California San Diego) Pascal. So they made the hardware interpret UCSD Pascal p-codes.
My thesis advisor, Raj Reddy, asked me to spend the summer trying to figure out how to get the software from these PERQ machines to run on our VAXs.
I started out writing a little hardware emulator, just to understand the p-codes. Then I realized I could actually write a code-generating program that translated from Pascal p-codes to VAX assembly code.
So I wrote a hardware emulator for the PERQ machine that did hardware emulation by translating, and I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why it was that the translation actually worked. One of the things that I noticed was that the code that I was getting at was actually better than the code that was coming out of the C compiler. I was quite floored by how well it worked, and I spent a bunch of time thinking about what it was about p-code that actually made it work, versus trying to do this for some other instruction set.
Then fast-forward a bunch of years, when I was trying to do the project that Java came out of. I had to do this architecture-neutral distribution format, and then I just went ka-ching! You know, this p-code translator thing would actually just drop in there."
As another example of hidden agenda, most WebAssembly sales also ignore PNaCL and CrossBridge, only mentioning asmjs as previous art.
But I don't understand, you make the Java joke because previous attempts aren't recognized enough?
There's plenty of blog posts about transitioning from them, Chromium (the only ones who implemented PNaCL) did one, as did others.
There are plenty of WebAssembly articles selling it as being the first kind of bytecode to support C like languages.
That doesn't detract from the technology itself, which is great.
And the actual Web-Assembly developers don't ignore that stuff. And even if they did so what? Re-inventing the wheel is common and sometimes something good and new comes out of it.
Something good like re-inventing EAR files.
And btw, not mentioning prior art doesn't count.
Tainted evidences, you ask. Me no bother.
https://leaningtech.com/cheerpj/
https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/
Thanks for making the revenge of plugins a reality.
WASI lets you use lots of languages included non-GC languages (GC'd languages are a bit of a WIP but it's going to happen).
It's funny that some of the most popular languages these days are Go (crippled Java 1.4) and Rust (Java for frontend web developers who need to be tricked into it) so it seems like lots of people really do want to write Java.