Java is an attempt by the Computer Sciences departments to recover the programming mystique and bottle it back up in the Ivory Tower.

If that were true, it would probably have offered a lot more OO features in version 1 than are even in the current version of the language. The only thing it arguably got right over C++ from a CS point of view was disallowing multiple inheirtance (which also means it's not there when you really do need it, except in a really hackish way).

Java's design is more like C++, but much simplier. You'll see plenty of comparisons between it and C++ that show development time is sharply reduced using Java. They're probably right, but then again, I don't think there are many people who will argue that C++ is a simple langauge to begin with. So I'm not impressed with such a comparison.

I think that if Java really was designed as a CS Ivory Tower language, it might be a lot better. There have been a lot of cool ideas developed since C++ was invented that Java doesn't include (though some are poping up in Perl6).