The sarcasm behind the quote is in that instead of focusing on what is really fundamental - message-passing between share-nothing entities (actors) and message-based polymorphism, they take an "inverse" view and focused on class hierarchies and all these irrelevant particulars from C++ which suits a "packer's" mentality. This is precisely why we have all these famous 120-character long methods, Factories of Factories and design patterns. (Norvig has a whole lecture about how good languages doesn't need design patterns).
Of course, there were backed by big money marketing memes which helped to create Java cult - packer's fear of "evil" pointers, their strive for "safety", "guarantees", " standardization" without any understanding of underlying principles.
Actually, Java ecosystem is the best compliment to the Programmers Stone essays, while Erlang is the same for design approach focused on what is fundamental - the very ideas emphasised in the Smalltalk design principles described above.
>The sarcasm behind the quote is in that instead of focusing on what is really fundamental - message-passing between share-nothing entities (actors) and message-based polymorphism, they take an "inverse" view and focused on class hierarchies and all these irrelevant particulars from C++ which suits a "packer's" mentality.
What's "really important" for whom?
Message passing between share-nothing entities might be good for Erlang but it wasn't really what Java was intented to be used for.
You seem to ignore the discussion in the Smalltalk design overview about the natural modes of human communication which, arguably, should be at the core of a programing language.
The author might be wrong in a few details, but similar intuitions and insight could be found in writings of variety of thinkers, from Navokov to and J. Krishnamurti to Chomsky (who suggested that language acquisition process is, well, a processes) and the inventors of NLP (with the notions of the deep structure and the surface structure) to Marvin Minsky with his Emotion Machine book.
