The C spirit I'm referring to is the raw, verbose and low-level-ish nature of writing code in C. For high-performance/low-latency Java apps it is absolutely cru

The C spirit I'm referring to is the raw, verbose and low-level-ish nature of writing code in C. For high-performance/low-latency Java apps it is absolutely crucial to have this level of control over code and resulting instructions emitted by the compiler. On the other hand - if you don't care about it and want to focus on domain-level stuff you absolutely can. This is what I find the most appealing about Java.