[eropple]

You can certainly write good code in Java. Totally doable, never said it wasn't. But I'd agree with you that Java programmers tend to write horrible code.

I linked the essay by pg (which I'm sure our upset friends did not read) that suggests a decent reason why: I tend to find that in the Java world there's a lack of awareness of the proper (and I do mean proper) way of writing a lot of more advanced, more indirected code. (This is the "thinking in Blub" you see from pg or Joel Spolsky.) I have a hunch that this lack of higher-level awareness results in weird kluges and hacks that don't even really match the "canonical" design patterns and idioms of what you or I might call "good" Java.

I feel pretty confident in saying that people who are fully comfortable with a more expressive tool (C#, Scala, even dynamic languages like Python or JavaScript) will write better Java than someone who is inculcated into Java first and Java only. It's easy, if unpleasant, to move "down" the continuum that pg references--it's not so easy to move "up", especially when you don't see a reason to (as these posters clearly demonstrate that they do not).