[robbrit]

They touched on this in the article, but I'll go into more detail here since it's been fashionable for years to bash on "Blub" languages like Java or Go. I myself was guilty of this for a long time until I started using these languages in settings where they shine, and developed an appreciation for them.

The argument is nothing to do with machine chugging time, and is entirely towards developer time. The problem with expressive languages like Lisp, Ruby, Python, etc. is that the language ends up varying from person to person - the more expressive the language, the more variance there is. This is a feature when you're a small team because the abstractions you build let you move quickly, but it is a bug when you're a large team maintaining a piece of software over years, where developers have come and gone. The ramp-up time to learn and understand the various abstractions that people have built over the years ends up accumulating and cancelling out the gains that those abstractions gave earlier on.

Blub languages on the other hand tend to be more uniform, so it's easier for someone who isn't very familiar with the code to dive in and understand what is going on.

[blub]

Java is no longer uniform, especially in the latest versions they're adding more and more features. And there's also Kotlin and project Lombok for people that want even more excitement.

And yet Java somehow manages to be both a boring language and still have too many things to lean. This achievement is probably not appreciated enough by those that criticize it.