It is true and it’s not a bug. It’s a feature. It’s an inherent property of the lazy pure functional programming model, not any particular language. I can’t remember where he said this but SPJ himself said that was a design goal of Haskell. In C you must specify both how and where computations take place. In Java you don’t have to worry about the where (because memory allocation is automatic) but you still how to worry about the how. Haskell goes one step further and abstracts both time and space away from the programmer. Touting this as a benefit of the language but then denying the negative consequences is attempting to have your cake and eat it too.

And for the record Java and other garbage collected languages are not generally suitable for interactive applications either. Anyone who has ever waited on a GC pause can attest to that. This is the exact reason Rust exists and why people continue to use C/C++ despite being inconvenient languages to use.