[HelloNurse]

Cleverness is more a function of a programmer's habits and attitude than of the language: one tries to be clever in any language.

C++ offers "efficient" ways to be clever, with varied and difficult challenges that can be addressed in relatively little difficult code; some are good or harmless (e.g. aligning struct fields to cache lines or concise towers of useful templates) and some are bad (e.g. flaky homemade not-too-smart pointers and almost-STL-compatible containers).

Java, on the contrary, facilitates the creation of large, boring and easy to read generic object-oriented tumors, that become satisfactorily clever only when they go very far (e.g. one more layer of indirection than everyone else) or reach theoretical limits (e.g. nothing left to invert control of).