What he liked was Scheme, not Java. You can catch a whiff of it every now and then. He got told to give it a Java-like syntax by a PHB so they could ride on Sun's marketing coat-tails.
And that's part of the problem: if what we'd started with was Java--, we might not have quite such a mess today.
Well, one of them was done in ten days by a guy who liked Java and the other one was done in a few years by a guy who liked Smalltalk, so...