Brian Goetz mentions Guy Steele's 1998 lecture "Growing a language" [1]. It's worth a watch if you haven't watched it yet. It's been discussed on HN several times [2].
Java gets a lot of flack in these parts, mostly by people who don't use Java and pull opinions out of their arse, but you'd be hard pressed watching both talks and not being impressed by the effort that's going into continuously improving the language.