open to interpretation
"The real pity (perhaps) is that Java, because of its interpreted nature and therefore its high overhead compared to compiled languages..."
did we miss the last ten years of JIT compilation technology work? once you've been through a piece of code a couple of times and the JIT has been at it, it's not interpreted at all... java's reluctance to give you access to the low-level fiddly bits you need to implement efficient HPC code is the real problem.
is C++ comparable to FORTRAN these days? people were up to all sorts of template-unpleasantness to do efficient vector calculations last time i looked...