> It's very easy to spot a universally bad tool. There are these screwdrivers with an integrated lamp to check if a wire is live or not. Only incompetent electricians use single phase testers. Amateurs buy them because they don't want to spend $30+ on a real two phase tester and that's fine because they are going to use them 10 times in the first week and then never again.

Electricians are in a mature profession with established training standards. Software developers aren't.

> The reality is that the difference between general purpose languages aren't that great. Even when highly conservative languages like Java adopt functional programming elements, they don't really add capabilities, they only change convenience. Lambdas are nicer than anonymous classes but they are still equivalent in functionality.

And yet every substantial Java codebase I've seen uses some kind of XML- or annotation-driven reflection/bytecode-manipulation proxying framework to implement something that a functional programming language would just do. Given how many bugs and complexities these frameworks introduce, no-one would use them if they didn't actually need them. So it seems that in practice the language is lacking something important, even if in theory it's "only convenience".