Big corporations are horribly inefficient and Enterprise Software necessarily so from that...if you're saying Java is terrible by nature of it being the goto for enterprise, then that makes sense. It took 20 years for it to swap places with COBOL and I expect it will be something else in 20 more.
I don't work with Java, but I can think of a few advantages off the top of my head:
- appreciation of backwards-compatibility (here it wins with Python);
- great debuggers and performance tools (e.g. Java Flight Recorder or Eclipse Memory Analyzer);
- easy deployment - you can just give someone a fat JAR (here it wins with all scripting languages, so Python, Ruby, PHP, or any other flavour of the month);
- industry-grade garbage collectors;
- publicly-available standard spec (here it wins with all the defined-by-implementation languages such as Python, PHP, Rust, basically most languages, and with languages which are standardized, but their specs aren't public: C, C++, Ruby);
- kind of like the previous point, but anyway: multiple implementations to choose from;
- I've been told it has good performance. I've never seen a real-world Java application which felt fast, but I've heard people put it at the pedestal and the Debian programming languages benchmarks game seems to corroborate that story;
Besides, the question wasn't about which technologies we like, but which we believe are entrenched so much, they aren't going to go away for a very long time. I don't see Java going away for another 100 years, no matter how much I would or wouldn't like to work with it.
I started using java 16 after a long hiatus from java 7 (instead doing rust and clojure) - I'm pretty happy with some of the new language features - lambdas, records, type inference, streams
IMO the Java stdlib also strikes just the right balance between control and abstraction. You can write thread-safe, performant code that makes reasonable tradeoffs between data structures without worrying too much about the details about memory layout and allocation. Said code also is easy to debug even without a debugger because there's almost never undefined behavior caused by use-after-free type bugs and error messages are clear. And the tooling - just IDEs alone, never mind debuggers - is mature and effective.
After using Python, Go, PHP, and C++ it's easy to see why Java is the go-to language for server development.
It wouldn't need as much research into efficient GCs if it was possible to write efficient programs in it. e.g. everything has a lock word, there's no value types or fixed length arrays, you have to allocate boxed integers.
people complain about java's verbosity, but I see that as a feature in places where there's a revolving door of consultants working on things. Everything is so explicit it is easy to see what some code does.
Big corporations are horribly inefficient and Enterprise Software necessarily so from that...if you're saying Java is terrible by nature of it being the goto for enterprise, then that makes sense. It took 20 years for it to swap places with COBOL and I expect it will be something else in 20 more.