"Java is a blue collar language. It’s not PhD thesis material but a language for a job. Java feels very familiar to many different programmers because I had a very strong tendency to prefer things that had been used a lot over things that just sounded like a good idea."
I think Kotlin is a language that adopts this idea really good.
via: http://www.reddit.com/r/Kotlin/comments/30vgnn/does_kotlin_have_any_killfeatures/crxbe25
James Gosling (1997): "The Feel of Java", http://www.win.tue.nl/~evink/education/avp/pdf/feel-of-java.pdf