there's quite a lot of bad practices surrounding the language back from where the enterprise tooling was a mess and xml was the rage, we're ten years past that but the language hate has never ceased (see my comment: -1)
I get the hate from the frameworks craze, but if one is in a position of being forced a crazy bloated framework without recourse that's not Java fault.
apart from that, you can debug servers the other side of the world with ease, hot replace code as you execute it, walk the heap with a lot of different views available, it has recently got top notch profiling, a sane injection and inversion of control framework which you can still debug at runtime, all the libraries you can dream of and bridges to hardware for the most demanding tasks.
I have held out since I love the language. I started using Java when it was new and actually very pragmatic and useful. Hated the enterprise phase, got bogged down by it but rose from the ashes. Now I'm a strong proponent of simplicity and libs over frameworks. And Java has great speed and simplicity for most tasks when memory management isn't a problem. But it's a constant struggle against old values in the business. And it doesn't take many conservative and bureucratic people to ruin a creative crowd. So I am looking to jump ship to what I consider in many ways inferior languages just to be able to be part of a modern culture.
To be clear, I still work at a company which is extremely forward (in averyting in beta sort of way). But still these old values hold everyone back and cause endless discussions of frameworks, processes and control structures vs creativity and speed.
I get the hate from the frameworks craze, but if one is in a position of being forced a crazy bloated framework without recourse that's not Java fault.
apart from that, you can debug servers the other side of the world with ease, hot replace code as you execute it, walk the heap with a lot of different views available, it has recently got top notch profiling, a sane injection and inversion of control framework which you can still debug at runtime, all the libraries you can dream of and bridges to hardware for the most demanding tasks.