I think some abstractions are more enduring than others. At one point everyone wrote assembler, then C came along and offered a write once and run everywhere. It so happened that C nailed the performance / expressiveness efficient frontier and created a world where people arent writing assembler anymore.

The question I find interesting in this context is - is it possible to write a rendering pipeline and UI toolkit all the way down in a garbage collected language that is performant. It appeared that we in industry have taken a step back and are now content with the bottom layer being all native. I dont know if its because the Sun UI team didnt have the right people or if the abstraction of a garbage collected high level language does not scale down to writing graphics apis.