Me too. He may well have valid points but, as someone who has written mission critical software systems in Java, this destroys the credibility of the article for me.
that said - he's right about IOTA. If that type of use is what it takes to make everything work, it has a long way to go.
The worst thing is that I can't find a useful alternative crypto currency that can be used stand alone (ie without converting to BTC) for e-commerce.
Only choices are BTC with its high fees and to some extent BCH.
Even Litecoin which is easy to use doesn't have many uses.
Dash, Monero and Zcash make bold claims but aren't particularly useful at the moment.
However, searching for useful things to do with Ripple as an individual leads to nada. All the use cases are provisional.
All the top 20 google results are for how to buy Ripple itself(in order to speculate).
I've started and stopped mining various currencies since BTC in 2011. Each time I stop because I do not see meaningful progress in usability.
Marketing speak there as all blockchains support global payments.
In full disclosure, I own a little bit of both. I first stumbled upon them after being disappointed with IOTA, and they deliver on a lot of what my initial expectations of IOTA were. I just want to be able to buy coffee with my crypto and not wait an hour for confirmation times!
That said, I know some great software can be produced in Java, ElasticSearch been one on top of my mind.
If Security is the goal, nor CPP nor Java is great. Proven Haskell or Rust might be more of a valid option.
That said, I steer clear of IOTA too. Relevant search terms for me are "IOTA roll your own crypto", "IOTA ternary logic" and "IOTA hash collision". And their whitepaper is indecipherable. Red flags all over the place, IMHO it's a scam.
I'm having a really hard time reconciling that with the fact that it's got a market cap in the billions at this point...