You're right. Java is a decent language with a decent type system (bar the lack of null safety and some other quirks). It's all the annotations and reflection and XML and magic that creates most of the pain, and that's the fault of the library and framework developers, not Java itself.
> Java is a decent language with a decent type system (bar the lack of null safety and some other quirks).
Optional is your (and my) friend. It has a small performance penalty and for historic reasons it will never be used everywhere, but for new externally visible code (code not in the class) I try to use it and it makes for face nicer APIs.
I never understood why XML config everywhere and "we should configure it all instead of programming it" took off. You shouldn't change things on production anyway, so the main aspect "you can change it without recompile" is moot and instead you have all the downsides of not having part of your code checked by the compiler.
