[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.)