People who designed Java are on the record expressing elitist reasons for Java's success and design goals. It boils down to: Java classes allow code monkeys to write spaghetti code that is forced to stay inside classes designed by others.

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.