As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.

When we switch to the point of view of a programmer using any of the languages higher up the power continuum, however, we find that he in turn looks down upon Blub. How can you get anything done in Blub? It doesn't even have y.

By induction, the only programmers in a position to see all the differences in power between the various languages are those who understand the most powerful one. (This is probably what Eric Raymond meant about Lisp making you a better programmer.) You can't trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox: they're satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs.

Generics, and annotation processing with code generation integrated in the compiler, are two example features supported by Java that improve this.

Haskell obviously is a lot better even.

Additionally, it’s also a question if, in the language, any state of the program is immediately obvious from the code – or if the syntax hides things (such as Go’s multi-return errors vs. Java’s exceptions, although Java could use an "ignore" keyword to ignore any error happening in a block or statement)

A powerful static type system can express everything a dynamic type system can, and more. (That’s why I tend to err towards static typing)