I would say it 'was' not it is. The amount of legacy java does not speak that its better right now. Only that it was better (or persived to be better) in the past. The argument for perseption vs actual 'goodness' is almost impossible to answer.

The intresting thing about java is that is was cleary worse then something and only became better because people used it so much. Java was adopted and developed around the same time that self was around as well. Now self at the time was owned by the same company, self was just as small to send over the wire, self allready very (very, very) performant (compared to java witch was grindingly slow) and had much better tooling.

The reason for all this seam that the people at sun just did not know understand what the technology they had laying around in some reasearch project.

Java was pushed and became what it is now, self was not and became what is now and thus proving that even with everything speaking for you at a point in time, you might not.

(PS, in the end it might have been a good thing that java was picked over self since self might actually have won over in the webspace and we would all be using propritary applets instead of the web we have today.)