[Stormbringer]

Of course it makes sense, Baseball and Football are both sports, why not compare them? Because as different sports it isn't really relevant. Are you going to say that cricket is better than tennis because they can hit the ball further? It's a stupid argument. Just because two things belong in the same broad category doesn't mean that you can meaningfully compare them.

It is especially specious to bash Java for not being a functional language, because it doesn't try to do that. Java is heavily OO, not functional. So let's say that functional languages are 'better'. Let's just take that as a given. Why then would you single out Java and not mention any of the other languages that are also not functional? Why not bash Smalltalk, or Objective-C?

To single out Java simply underscores the irrelevance of the comparison.

Hence, rather than compare teams from two different sports, you should compare teams from the same sport. Likewise, if you want to make the claim that Common Lisp is the ultimate functional programming language, you should compare it to another functional programming language, not an OO language, or something like Prolog or COBOL.

[nessus42]

Why then would you single out Java and not mention any of the other languages that are also not functional? Why not bash Smalltalk, or Objective-C?

There's nothing specious in an argument that isn't as general as it might be. If I soundly argue that red space ships are faster than blue cars, it's still a sound argument, even if I might have also successfully argued that all space ships are faster than all cars.

In any case, Java is often singled out because it is egregiously bad in quite a few ways, but arguments that claim that Lisp excels in certain ways compared to other languages, would typically apply against Smalltalk and Objective-C. (Though Smalltalk is dynamically typed, so that might be a putative virtue that Java doesn't have.)