I am just curious to see if you guys would want Notch or Jebs back! Please post in the comments of this thread the reason why you choose whichever. Personally, I want Notch back. When Jebs first introduced NPC's, he kinda dropped the rating of this game and the idea of it quite a bit. I would rather mine alone and live alone rather than having a bunch of NPC's running around who are crudely based off of the mod named Millenaire.
Jeb, Notch took too long to implement features and some of them were pointless I remember waiting for a month or so and all he added was long grass and a map.
It could work just fine in Java, but Notch was not such a great coder when he started with minecraft. (he still isn't that great, even though he's improved) Jeb and his team have done a great job on minecraft, ever since they started working on minecraft everything became more efficient. Though what they really need to do is completely rewrite minecraft and make it more efficient, but that would take many months to do.