The end of dumbing-down of programming?

Times are changing. Definitely. Think about this little story: do you remember what Java's USP was at the beginning? Yes, the garbage collection, and yes, the JVM portability. But the main thing was it's philosophy of not allowing bad programmers to make bad mistakes. We don't have pointers, we don't have operator overloading, we don't have multiple inheritance, our core classes are final... As one person expressed it at that time: "...they gave me a paper hammer instead of a real one so I can't hit my fingers!" And that's the reason why i din't like it, didn't really want to use it, and consequently missed out on a cash-cow :-(.*

But yesterday, I read this on the InfoQ**:

... And it is true, my experience weaves that out too: you can create environment really restricted just to keep bad developers out of trouble, but these restricted environments harm the productivity of your best programmers. Basically what you do is: you are not speeding up your bad developers and you are slowing down your best developers and that's why our productivity stinks in software right now, but the attitude is changing around.

I've read similar complaints before, but as it seems, after the Ruby-shock (RoR faster than Struts and 10x mote productive) such opinion is somehow fashionable and even almost mainstream today.

What do you say? Isn't that the old C++ philosophy we are returning to? I cite Bjarne***:

Kierkegaard was a strong proponent for the individual against "the crowd" and has some serious discussion of the importance of aesthetics and ethical behavior. I couldn't point to a specific language feature [....] but he is one of the roots of my reluctance to eliminate "expert level" features, to abolish "misuses", and to limit features to support only uses that I know to be useful.

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* The language was just plain uninteresting to me, and I didn't see its real merits at the time. Maybe I didn't want to see them?
** http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Languages-Platforms-Neal-Ford
*** http://technologyreview.com/Infotech/17831/page3/


PS: BTW, concerning the "Java is the next Cobol" thing, there was a discussion on some German Java forum here, where I argued with 2 arguments, but as I see now, I (and everyone else) missed the most important one. Namely: Java is the new Cobol, as it's mainly used in corprate and business settings (like Cobol was). The solution is simple, isn't it?