Like the creators of sitcoms or junk food or package tours, Java's designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them. Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp.
From here: http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html
To me that's the definition of building a language for yourself. You actually write a language that you need to solve a specific problem you have.
And I find his categorization of good vs bad languages somewhat absurd. What actually makes Ada, C++, and Pascal bad? His lack of understanding? What makes C, Perl, and Lisp good? The inverse?
While I have my own personal prefernces with respect to languages, I fully believe a large part of it is familiarity. I've NEVER met anyone who could argue why a particular language was truly bad. They usually are just passionately arguing religion, and I find that tiring. It was cute when I was in high school, but those debates are getting tired.
[1] http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html