PG's argument must have seemed surreal even at the time. Java was already entrenched by 2001. His argument seems to be "large corporations never do anything good, all innovation comes from individual hackers".<p>So he hadn't just missed the point on Java, but on where the entire world was going. Users want products, not code. The hackers may be able to use low-level code to make hardware do unexpected things, but it turns out that there wasn't much utility in that.<p>New capabilities came from new hardware, not clever exploits of existing hardware. Smartphones opened up whole new universes. But nobody cared what language the software was written in, and the crucial ability was to get the software solid, not clever.<p>People may not love Java; it may not be "fun". But it gets the job done, in ways that "fun" projects don't. When I wrote C I spent most of my time running down difficult errors that simply weren't necessary. The minute I saw a NullPointerException stack trace I knew I wasn't going to be writing C any more.<p>That's not about Java per se. It's about PG missing why programmers get paid to program. The hackers may not like it, and maybe that was PG's target audience for that essay. But the rest of the world just wants the code done, and they're the ones paying the bills.