[armitron]

Well, unfortunately, the features most important in Lisp and Smalltalk are not memory safety, GC, dynamic linking and reflection.

Which is one reason Java is a shitty language. It may be popular, "a blue collar language" but it's not sitting on some apex of programming languages, and it's certainly not Art. Which makes sense if you consider that the vast majority of programmers working today are not artists or craftsmen, but little more than commoditized manual laborers. I also include the "engineers" working at such perceived bastions of engineering excellence as Google here [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14066898

[pron]

Well, that's your opinion. I'm not sure by what metrics you think languages should be ranked. There's certainly no evidence that any other language results in better software, or that linguistic features have a significant bottom-line impact at all. Whatever few studies we do have indicate that the coice of language makes little difference, certainly ehen it comes to large software. Of course, language designers and PL enthusiasts make all sorts of claims, but they're largely unsubstantiated at this point.