I never understood the disdain for Java that I'd hear from Spolsky. It wasn't perfect, but it was certainly more cross platform than .net at the time.
The original version of Wasabi, known as Thistle, was written in Java, by the intern in the class before Aardvark’d. It transpiled ASP to PHP.
Every intern class was named after an animal with the next consecutive letter. I don’t remember any of them except Aardvark, and I was a “B????” intern!