Steele played a major role in shaping Java, and his perspective is that from a Lisp vantage point, so, naturally, he argues for the opppsite of you.

An important nuance is that where a language like Go or Java limits you to only sentences using nothing but the most common 100 words, Lisp makes it really easy to define other words and integrate them in your speech as though they always existed.

Of course, that ability may lead to a lack of canonical definitions and everyone may soon speak their local variant of the language, which can be both a good and a bad thing depending on your priorities.