That's a ridiculous defense: they were obviously swayed by fashion at some point. It just happened several years ago.

You appear to tilting at windmills of your own making. What I find ridiculous. Is your claim of having had a window into the operational decisions of NSA back when they opted for Java.

Let me see if I understand your argument.

If they had chosen a newer language you didn't approve of, you would have glibly dismissed their engineering decision as "being swayed by fashion."

Since they chose Java, though, the engineers are being "professional" and anyone saying that their decision was swayed by fashion is being "ridiculous," claiming to have a "window into the operational decisions of NSA."

A little bias here perhaps?

They use more "fashionable" languages too. Just not for distributed databases. Most popular open source databases are also written in C/C++/Java.