The thing is, I believe that everything (or very nearly everything) that pg said about Java in this essay is correct. So why was he so wrong in terms of saying

The thing is, I believe that everything (or very nearly everything) that pg said about Java in this essay is correct. So why was he so wrong in terms of saying that Java would not be successful? I'd posit that it's because of the one thing that Java got oh-so-right compared to most other languages that were around near its inception. And that one thing is object compatibility, and enabling library based development using binary libraries (as opposed to having to pull library code into your project and compile it alongside your own code). The cross-platform compatibility stuff, while not quite the "write once, run anywhere" dream was also close enough to be a useful factor. I remember building Java code on a Windows machine and deploying it to AIX systems circa 2001-2003 or so and just being amazed at how seamless it was. And for an "honourable mention" one might throw in the JDWP/JPDA stuff[1]. Java made it really easy to connect a symbolic debugger to a running (remote) server and step through code line by line. No, it wasn't the first environment that could do that, but I think that taken together these three things went a long way towards offsetting the various negatives of Java and helping to gain so much traction.