A great post. I remember the criticism of Java circa 1997. It has come a long, long way indeed. Tangentially, this is a reason why many (very smart) programmer

A great post. I remember the criticism of Java circa 1997. It has come a long, long way indeed. Tangentially, this is a reason why many (very smart) programmers stick to "blub" like Java. In practical every day reality, the investments in VM improvements, libraries & tools play a huge role in productivity. As an example, most modern IDEs (really lots of macros in disguise!) take the pain out of most of the verbosity while writing code, and such verbosity actually is a plus for reading code.