The only difference is that Java was actually novel on the runtime side at the time (and still is), and “conservative, blue-collar” on the language side, deliberately. It is not hard to add many many features to a language in itself, what is hard is to balance only a few features whose interactions are sane and give enough expressivity for their bucks. I think plenty of otherwise great language suffers from this problem, most notably C++, but swift and c# are hitting that point for me as well. They have so many features that no developer can hold all of them in his/her head.

I think this slow moving is really an advantage for Java, such a widely used language can’t allow breaking changes willy-nilly so any language feature will effectively become written in stone. Also, surprisingly many things can be expressed purely by “objects with method” APIs (Steele’s growing a language)

A new language on the other hand could have actually iterated fast because relatively few programs are written for them in the early years, go is just not a good language.