> I can assure you that anybody who makes members virtual by default does not understand the feature, even if that body is named Steele.
You may be reviled by that design decision, and the ramifications thereof, but I'd put my money on Guy Steele having a sharp grasp of the feature, the alternative design decisions, and the ramifications of most possibilities. If I were designing a language, and could pick any of a handful of people to help with the design, Guy would be near the top of the list, if nothing more that for his ability to explain things clearly and succinctly.
I can imagine Steele advising against it, and Gosling ignoring him and doing it anyway. I earnestly hope that is what happened.
I cannot account for Java having retained so many misfeatures of C despite having no backward-compatibility constraint, other than that nobody was paying any attention.
You may be reviled by that design decision, and the ramifications thereof, but I'd put my money on Guy Steele having a sharp grasp of the feature, the alternative design decisions, and the ramifications of most possibilities. If I were designing a language, and could pick any of a handful of people to help with the design, Guy would be near the top of the list, if nothing more that for his ability to explain things clearly and succinctly.