Your story is about how Java culture developed its anti-intellectualism. I think there's some truth in it.
But i think there's another significant factor. Java came as a successor, of sorts, to C++. Early Java programmers were former C++ programmers, and its designers had C++ experience (as well Smalltalk, Lisp, etc experience). As a result, many features of Java are responses to pain felt in C++. Feeling the pain of memory leaks and use-after frees? Garbage collection. Feeling the pain of segfaults and incomprehensible pointer chains? No pointer arithmetic (the party line for years was that Java had no pointers, only references). Feeling the pain of baffling symbol use in APIs? No operator overloading. Feeling the pain of aeons-long build times? Compilation to bytecode, with linking left to runtime.
I believe this pain response carried over into the culture. The pain in C++ didn't just come from the language, but from the fact that people did clever things with it (template metaprogramming had been invented - discovered? summoned? - in 1994). There was a strong association between cleverness and pain. Cleverness was therefore taboo in the brave new pain-free world of Java.
There was another point in the grandparent, and in the original post, about Java culture's tradition of verbosity. I think this is also a post-C++ thing. In C++, it takes a lot of writing to get anything done. In Java, it takes a bit less. You feel like you're moving faster when you write Java. So, as an ex-C++ programmer who has the endurance to write a lod of code, and is feeling the exhilaration of moving fast, what do you do? Write as much code as possible?
There has certainly been a huge shift back towards concision in Java, but it's not something that's completely permeated the community. There are people today still learning Java from books written by people who learned in the '90s and who internalised that logorrheic style. We'll probably never move entirely beyond it.
But i think there's another significant factor. Java came as a successor, of sorts, to C++. Early Java programmers were former C++ programmers, and its designers had C++ experience (as well Smalltalk, Lisp, etc experience). As a result, many features of Java are responses to pain felt in C++. Feeling the pain of memory leaks and use-after frees? Garbage collection. Feeling the pain of segfaults and incomprehensible pointer chains? No pointer arithmetic (the party line for years was that Java had no pointers, only references). Feeling the pain of baffling symbol use in APIs? No operator overloading. Feeling the pain of aeons-long build times? Compilation to bytecode, with linking left to runtime.
I believe this pain response carried over into the culture. The pain in C++ didn't just come from the language, but from the fact that people did clever things with it (template metaprogramming had been invented - discovered? summoned? - in 1994). There was a strong association between cleverness and pain. Cleverness was therefore taboo in the brave new pain-free world of Java.
There was another point in the grandparent, and in the original post, about Java culture's tradition of verbosity. I think this is also a post-C++ thing. In C++, it takes a lot of writing to get anything done. In Java, it takes a bit less. You feel like you're moving faster when you write Java. So, as an ex-C++ programmer who has the endurance to write a lod of code, and is feeling the exhilaration of moving fast, what do you do? Write as much code as possible?
There has certainly been a huge shift back towards concision in Java, but it's not something that's completely permeated the community. There are people today still learning Java from books written by people who learned in the '90s and who internalised that logorrheic style. We'll probably never move entirely beyond it.