Guy Steele didn't actually design Java. He was hired after the language was designed to write the spec. Of course, writing a specification exposed problems with the design, and those problems had to be fixed, so he had some influence on those parts of the language.

Dragging out that quote doesn't really answer the question. What about Java makes it like Lisp? The ability to (painfully) implement closures with objects and vice-versa? That's also shared with every other OO language, includes ones that would not normally be considered Lisp-influenced.

What other OO languages? Ruby is Lisp-influenced for sure. :)

Anyway, the context is explicitly Java vs C++, not Smalltalk or Ruby or Python. I imagine if Smalltalk were the dominant platform this would've turned out differently. So let's do a compare and contrast.

Java has the following properties: methods are all virtual; single inheritance; inheritance isn't public/private; final instead of const; GC and references w/o memory alloc or pointers; a package system exists; generics instead of templates; no operator overloading. And Java 6 does have a limited form of closures, believe it or not-- you can access a variable declared as final with an anonymous inner class.

None of that is true of C++, and just about all of those substantially increase the complexity of the language. I don't even like Java, mind you, but after reading Effective C++ the influence of higher-level languages like Lisp was pretty obvious to me, even if Lisp might not have been the only or even primary influence on Java.