I've written tons of Java over the last decade or so & think its been a great evolutionary step from C++ and Smalltalk
Did anyone else go wtf?
Did anyone else go wtf?
In particular, GC and a great standard library for C++, and file-based and more performant (yes, yes, hotspot is based on a smalltalk derived vm, blah blah, the numbers still grossly favor java) and a more conventional interaction with the host system over smalltalk. The last is bizarre as java still absurdly sandboxes away the CRT. Oh well. Less of an advancement on Smalltalk, more of a more palatable branch of evolution, maybe.
It seems now at least the JVM, or the best bits of it will spawn other branches.
As for the java language (which is probably what pg was referring to?) - I agree it is probably a dead end. Except in some shallow basic syntactic sense - javascript and so on (the continuation of the "curly braces") - not sure if that means anything though. In any cases, certainly the lessons learned will continue (what worked well, what didn't) into a whole lot of other languages and has been.
"No wacky monkey patching involved, or doubting of who added a method, when and how - which is great for large projects with lots of folks working on the same code over long periods of time."
This may be why he didn't even mention Clojure; too open, not enough B&D for his taste.