He simply stated that he liked C++, which is a fact.
Well actually he said "it's not as scary as it looks". He then goes on to say that "he doesn't understand pointers" which I think proves my point rather well, namely that he has not understood just how scary C++ is. That statement is just so wrong.
Yes. Both as a statement of fact, and as a metaphor. The best Java (or programming in general) book ever written (Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java, for those playing at home) is absolutely free. You can download it off his site. Why does everyone worship Java?
Because along with C# and Visual Basic, it's the holy trinity of imperative programming languages. It's horrendously slow
Compared to what? Java hasn't been "horrendously" slow in 5 or 6 years (since the release of 1.5). and it's not as cross-platform as everyone thinks (you have to have the Virtual Machine mega-download installed on every gamer's computer).
Yes. However the JVM is available for a ridiculous amount of platforms, which is really all it takes for something to be cross platform. Also considering that most Operating Systems weigh in at more than 1 GB these days, the 50-60 MB that is the JVM is dwarfed by comparison, for any platform that isn't QNX. I stopped once I realized that I couldn't use booleans in statements (i.e. "variable = (otherVariable mod 2)*3;"), for no reason other than the fact that Java hates me.
First of all, that's an assignment operation, not a boolean expression. The reason it doesn't work is because "mod" is not a keyword in Java (which uses % for modulus). Other than syntactical errors, your example works just fine here.