Asside from the gawd awful language, the thing is that java is nothing special.

If its platform native code vs VM, well we got: Java (woo)

Ruby (woo-er)

Python (woo-er-er)

Haskel

Lua

Freaken' Emacs and it's lisp

tons of lisp derivitives

The list goes on. Java is not the only VM on the market. This article would have been good in 1996.