Comment by exasperaited

Java is most of why we have a proliferation of VM-based languages and a big part of why WASM looks the way it does (though as I understand it, WASM is the shape it is in some measure because it rejects JVM design-for-the-language quirks).

I would also not blame Java for the worst of OO, all of that would have happened without it. There were so many OO culture languages pretending to that throne. Java got there first because of the aforementioned VM advantage, but the core concepts are things academia was offering and the industry wanted in non-Ada languages.

I would say Java also had a materially strong impact on the desire for server, database and client hardware agnosticism.

Some of this is positive reinforcement: Java demonstrates that it's better if you don't have to worry about what brand your server is, and JDBC arguably perfected ODBC.

Some of it is negative: a lot of the move to richer client experiences in the browser has to do with trying to remove client-side Java as a dependency, because it failed. It's not the only bridged dependency we removed, of course: Flash is equally important as a negative.