I shudder to even think of the cumulative ecological cost of Bob's line of thinking, here. Imagine if Henry Ford did this... we'd all be getting 0.3mpg, but hey... productivity!
Relative to what, though? It’s a garbage collected language running on a virtual machine. At the end of the day, if I want high level ergonomics I’ll use Python and if I want performance I’ll use C. If I want both at the same time I’ll use rust. I don’t see where Java fits in this outside of some case where I’m forced to use it due to some library requirement or deployment constraint.
Closure is weird if you’re not already into lisps (I know, I know our fathers’ parentheses). It’s not easy to just pick up and start solving problems, because everything feels foreign.
I don’t know if it’s dead or not, as I’m sure people still love to use it… it just doesn’t have any major upside that’d make me want to adopt it.
Rust, as you’ve mentioned, is the opposite… huge upside out of the box and easy to adopt, so no surprise it’s getting more talk these days.
We recently had to deal with a case of this at my company. The story is almost exactly the same, guy sounded great, passed all the interviews, had a killer resume etc. When he actually got to work, it was clear that he barely knew how to use a computer let alone program one. He had trouble searching for string of text in an open buffer, or explaining simple code in a language that his resume claimed he had expertise. It's very unfortunate and ultimately just wasted everyone's time.
I wouldn’t have expected that to go well.