Some of these objections seem dated. For example, accessor method overhead is optimized away now, and has been for a while. I'm not a big fan of Java, but I do

Some of these objections seem dated. For example, accessor method overhead is optimized away now, and has been for a while. I'm not a big fan of Java, but I do use it for work. For the kind of applications we write (large, long-running, thousands of users with lots of state) Java's memory management is one of it's strong points. That's why I'm excited about new languages based on the JVM such as Scala and Clojure.