The criticism of Java language is very much to the point (re: verbosity, inheritance). There's some confusion where he calls anonymous classes implementing inte

The criticism of Java language is very much to the point (re: verbosity, inheritance). There's some confusion where he calls anonymous classes implementing interfaces "abstract classes with virtual methods"; that's not to say that it's not an awkward approach to closures and function pointers. There's also criticism of synchronized and the Thread class, but there's no mention of the strong points (Doug Lea's java.util.concurrent). However, the criticism of JVM seems like it's written in 1999 about the Blackdown JVM (Josh Bloch in his interview in Coders At Work attributes much distrust of Java earlier on at Google to experience with this platform). Hot-spot can, many times, be within 10-15% of C's performance. In many cases code running on the JVM will outperform C++'s runtime (and particularly boost). That's not to say there aren't issues: garbage collection pauses, the stack based nature -- rightly -- is pointed out as an impediment, but it's odd that LLVM isn't mention. However, excluding JVM due to performance (especially when used with modern languages, e.g. Scala, Clojure, Ruby, Javascript) seems short-sighted. See Cliff Click's post on JVM performance: http://blogs.azulsystems.com/cliff/2009/09/java-vs-c-performance-again.html http://blogs.azulsystems.com/cliff/2009/09/java-vs-c-perform... Repeat after me: HotSpot is not Blackdown, 1.5+ is not 1.2 (you have non-blocking I/O -- even though NIO is still painful to use, you have autoboxing, you have foreach, you have -- for all their limitations -- generics, you have annotations), you can run more than Java on the JVM. Even if you do choose Java (which has many flaws, not the least of them being a marketing-driven language, aimed at enterprise C++ developers, rather than a language made by hackers for themselves), you don't have to use Spring and J2EE. In most cases performance is a MacGuffin when it comes to Java and JVM.