The article linked to in the blog you posted has been removed, so it's hard to be sure, but as Kilian says, it's likely that when he says "half the language" he means that C# and Java feel like C++ but with a lot of features and constructs removed to make them easier to use or safer.

Back in 2006, when this was written, when C# was relatively young and Java was in many ways immature, and when power vs safety seemed like a trade-off where you could only pick one, this wasn't a totally unreasonable position to take.

These days that position isn't reasonable at all. Just thinking about mainstream languages, C# and Java have matured enormously, borrowing features from other languages (particularly functional) to promote writing safe code. We also have languages like Rust and Swift that are built from the ground up to do this.

Lastly, if someone looks down on a language because it holds your hand, or that a language being hard to use is somehow a good thing, I'd take anything they said with a grain of salt. You only have to look at the embarrassing number of bugs found in code we depend on every day, written by the brightest minds in the industry, that would have been trivially avoided by using 'safe' languages, to see why.

The article linked to in the blog you posted has been removed, so it's hard to be sure, but as Kilian says, it's likely that when he says "half the language" he means that C# and Java feel like C++ but with a lot of features and constructs removed to make them easier to use or safer.

Back in 2006, when this was written, when C# was relatively young and Java was in many ways immature, and when power vs safety seemed like a trade-off where you could only pick one, this wasn't a totally unreasonable position to take.

These days that position isn't reasonable at all. Just thinking about mainstream languages, C# and Java have matured enormously, borrowing features from other languages (particularly functional) to promote writing safe code. We also have languages like Rust and Swift that are built from the ground up to do this.

If someone looks down on a language because it holds your hand, or says that a language being hard to use is somehow a good thing, I'd take anything they said with a grain of salt. You only have to look at the embarrassing number of bugs found in code we depend on every day, written by the brightest minds in the industry, that would have been trivially avoided by using 'safe' languages, to see why.