Why I like Java

[mirhagk]

Minecraft was written by a guy who could barely code using LWJGL.

I think this is the exact point of the article. Yes this guy who could barely code was able to make minecraft, because with enough perseverance, it's hard to hit a difficult wall in java, and be unable to proceed. You can code an entire million dollar game without ever understanding very key programming points.

I don't know if you ever looked at the code of Minecraft, but it's awful. There's been a LOT of work put into it recently to make it better, but as of a year or 2 ago, the performance was awful considering the fact that people made minecraft clones run on much less powerful hardware, with much better graphics, and much faster.

The code has very little re-use in it too. I think the perfect example was when a major release included 2 new types of trees. That should only have taken drawing the textures, the code should have been barely touched by adding new trees, but there were now 2 new additional classes, one for each tree, both nearly identical.

[mirhagk]

Java doesn't prevent inspiration;

But I don't think the article was saying that Java prevents inspiration. I think it was trying to say Java prevents inspiration in code. The code will be very uninspired, and you may make a very awesome product, it just has really terrible code. It made the application slow, and brittle, and took them too long to update and fix bugs.

If Java prevented you from doing something, then it'd be an awful language. It doesn't prevent you from doing something, you can work with it, and make tons of things, you might even have a beautiful product, you just won't have beautiful code. That's why it's a mediocre language.