[bitdiddle]

agreed. I mean boring in the sense that I don't care how my car works.

control/productivity tradeoffs like GC are indeed a tougher decision. For a real-time trading system I would think a JVM might be a disaster, though Erlang/OTP also uses GC so it largely depends on the app and where the GC enters into it. Code generation is interesting. Statically typed languages like Java, enable IDEs that can generate a lot of the boilerplate, through annotations, etc.. but there is also the issue of control/productivity and the economics of programming teams that enters into it. I haven't looked closely but I think GWT is a good example of where folks can leverage their Java assets by generating javascript, for which rich toolsets seems to be lacking.

For what it's worth, having been raised on CLOS and Lisp on a Symbolics, C++ was a step backward and I considered working with it for 3 years a net loss. As I understand it C++ was an attempt to codify what folks were already doing in C with macros. As some famous programmer whose name I forget said, "Java took us about half way back to Lisp".