No, wondered why he was restating the obvious. There are certainly features of both C++ and Smalltalk which would be nice to have in it, but Java is, on the whole, an advancement over them.

In particular, GC and a great standard library for C++, and file-based and more performant (yes, yes, hotspot is based on a smalltalk derived vm, blah blah, the numbers still grossly favor java) and a more conventional interaction with the host system over smalltalk. The last is bizarre as java still absurdly sandboxes away the CRT. Oh well. Less of an advancement on Smalltalk, more of a more palatable branch of evolution, maybe.