Simon expanded on his view in a very reasonable manner.

My personal view is that the way to expand the developer community is not to 'drop the threshold' but rather to expand the range of languages that target the Java platform. That's why the discussion in this morning's keynote concerning the embrace of programming languages like PHP and Jython (Sean will be pleased!) is so important. PHP and Jython programming isn't dumbed-down - it's just the use of the tools that are fit for the job, and embracing a wider range of tools simply expands the scope rather than lowers the bar.

The only problem with this expansion is that now you've taken out a piece of the equation, which is the language. One of the supposed benefits of Java is that there is only one language that you need to know. Of course you can run any language that you like on the JVM, but Sun hasn't really been promoting that. If they do, then the story starts to sound a lot like the .NET CLR story...

The best quote in the exchange was this one from William:

A friend of mine recently started including "Lisp is the red pill" in his e-mail signature. I think I know what he means, now.