1. Java,
2. Inferno,
3. Oberon System (Niklaus Wirth, ETH Zurich),
4. Squeak (Apple, Walt Disney Imagineering)
5. Erlang (Ericsson, Joe Armstrong) still going strong.
IMHO, Technologically Java was the worst and least innovative. Platform adaption is "Worse is Better" so Java won.
Oberon, Erlang and Squeak were are all amazing in their own way.
Squeak/Smalltalk had the issue of programs and runtime images being conflated, making version control awkward (at the time at least).
Erlang is a functional language.
All the above had relatively small and poorly documented libraries.
Java combined an imperative C-like and relatively simple language, with an evolvable bytecode-oriented VM, garbage collector, large and well documented libraries + lots of tutorials, and really intense VM engineering. Easy to forget but Cliff Click and colleagues were the first to show that a JIT compiler could produce code competitive with gcc, Sun also bought/implemented stuff like deoptimization which is still relatively advanced, and then gave that tech away for free. From the end user POV all these things mattered a lot.
Innovation loses to taking small steps to improve the worse alternative. Community is built around tinkering and fixing errors, getting around design failures.
Java was a pretty major clean break when it came out. It was probably right at the limit of what could be done innovation-wise whilst still being targeted at the mainstream.
Also agreed: Java and JVM are were not the "worse is better" options at the time of adoption. Hype alone did not create the massive shift to Java that occurred in late 90s. It was a genuinely positive development for the practice and people were getting results. It was Java's 2nd act of moving into "enterprise" (and Sun's mismanagement of that effort) that created its current sense of 'heaviness' of language.
The reason I always hated Java was because it was designed by good programmers for bad programmers in a looking down at them way, not a good programmers for themselves to use.
btw. Java design team licensed the Oberon compiler sources years before to study it.
The code has been available for years before Oak was born, it is even on the book.
Not only were CORBA and DCOM much worse, Java EE was the reboot of Objective-C framework for distributed computing at Sun. And those Objective-C lengthy methods are quite the pleasure to type without code completion.
While they certainly could have done better, it was already an huge improvement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(programming_language)
In the words of Guy Steele: And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?
* https://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/...
Java has only familiar surface syntax.
Semantics has almost nothing common with C++. Different object model, memory model, execution model, ...
That's the genius of both Java and Javascript. Make it look familiar without being one at all.