[eitland]

The point is: for the majority of programmers - including a number who can write both reasonable reasonable C and reasonable Java - they will create better, faster programs with Java than with C and in shorter time.

There are absolutely times when Java doesn't cut it but at that point your options are getting increasingly limited in many ways: who can build and maintain it, what kind of languages and libraries you can use, the hardware you use, tuning etc.