Sounds to me like James Gosling hears footsteps, and he's getting nervous:

"There have been a number of language coming up lately," noted James Gosling today at Sun's World Wide Education & Research Conference in New York City when asked if Java was in any kind of danger from the newcomers. "PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems," he continued, "but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems."

I'm sure he knows that due to the vast well of experience he has with Ruby, PHP (etc). Apparently, in Gosling's world, Ruby is only used for web pages. Sure James - and Java is only used for applets. How often do they let him out of his lab? His cluelessness abounds:

PHP (for example) is able to make things simpler because it's 100% aimed at web pages, Gosling explained. Whereas with Java, he said, "We have a balancing act: we need the simplicity but we also need power."

Hmm - I see that the phrase "best tool for the job" isn't part of his lexicon. Simplicity? In Java? Yeah, how about that implementation of generics, hmm?

David Heinemeier Hansson has related thoughts.