FWIW another thing that Guy Steele advocated was value types, which as I understand it is ongoing work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Valhalla_(Java_languag...

https://openjdk.org/projects/valhalla/

I have said in the past, and will say now, that I think it would be a good thing for the Java programming language to add generic types and to let the user define overloaded operators.

He did get the generic types though, I think that was well over a decade ago now