my last exposure to Java was many years ago in the EJBs timeframe, and I didn't have a lot of fun with it (leading to staying away from Java positions since then).
Last year I had to work on a Spark application and I was honestly a bit uneasy when I started but I was quite surprised at how much nicer it was to develop in Java 8 and how well IntelliJ worked (first time in probably 20 years that I wasn't using emacs for development) and the performance was quite surprising as well.
I still mostly work in python day-to-day, but if I was looking at starting something from scratch, Java would definitely something I'd look at quite seriously.
Last year I had to work on a Spark application and I was honestly a bit uneasy when I started but I was quite surprised at how much nicer it was to develop in Java 8 and how well IntelliJ worked (first time in probably 20 years that I wasn't using emacs for development) and the performance was quite surprising as well.
I still mostly work in python day-to-day, but if I was looking at starting something from scratch, Java would definitely something I'd look at quite seriously.