Those who can, do, those who can't, write about it...
It's just another example of people writing about technology without having the actual experience of doing it. Their view is tainted by lack of knowledge.
Various languages have been successful at the time due to more than just the elegance of the programming model. Most were massively constrained by the hardware they ran on. It's disingenuous to claim COBOL, FORTRAN or even BASIC is bad (especially for the use of GOTO) when Java can suck more memory on a single VM than was ever available to 1000 or more machines running any of the above languages.
Java is an answer for laziness in programming brought about by the idea that O/S functional abstraction and cross platform code is better than writing for the O/S itself.
For reference, in the 35 years I've been using computers, I've programmed at some stage (not always professionally) in all the languages referenced (yes including FORTH, APL, C, C++, BASIC, COBOL, Assembler (mainframe, Z80, 6502), Java, Javascript), plus the more obscure ones like SAS.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
