I didn't phrase it correctly. What I meant was that Mr Steele was part of the Java org in the early days. He is from a generation before my time but from what I gather a Scheme/Lisp luminary is someone who is competitive with the Golang designers and the PLT PhDs in general.

The most glaring issues were fixed in Java5 (similar to how golang just had their generics story improved). It took us all the way to Java8 to have a semi-pleasant language. I'm still waiting to see if Golang's generics are good enough to make abstractions/monadic operations similar to the Java's Streams widespread. If memory serves, basic pattern matching is coming in Java20, only 12+ years after Scala.

In contract to, say, virtual threads, a lot of these are language-level features. So they could have been done _much_ earlier. A generation of developers had their taste for abstractions skewed by the early days Java. Doing the job of the compiler in their heads. Now the next generation finds itself in the same situation with Golang.