"Instead what I'd like to claim is that Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers

"Instead what I'd like to claim is that Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers." I'd like to clarify that doing a bunch of pointer arithmetic and manual memory management does not necessarily make someone a great programmer. In many cases, it distinguishes them as a "midgrade and needs to learn something about premature optimization" programmer. Great programmers write solutions that make hard problems look easy, and mediocre programmers write solutions that make medium problems look very hard. Java makes it easy to do either of those -- anyone who's reviewed a decent quantity of Java code can attest to this (compare the code style in, say, Guava or Lucene with your typical J2EE app).