https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Java-a-bad-language


No programming language is bad. It's just that they are suited for different domains.

What Linus Torvalds had to say in the video, is subjective, so some one who made some really successful software with Java, would say Java is better. Linus' preference is driven towards more bare metal control and speed, and so the answer.

C and Java, are languages of different domain.

C is for low level, performant code, whereas Java is aimed at providing platform independence, providing a common interface through JVM and can become slow due to garbage collection pauses happening in the background.

What C has, is the low level control, which Java cannot provide.
What Java has, is the better abstraction level, which in C takes more effort to achieve, although possible.

IMO only when languages share a common domain, then we are valid to ask which is better and which may not be.