I started out with Visual Basic about 10 years ago, as an introduction to programming it did it's job well. I then moved on to C/C++ as I started my MSCS. It was great for doing implementation of algorithms and image processing. Working relatively low level, optimizing for speed and handling garbage collection yourself.
As I started my professional carrer I went on to Java, and I've never looked back. The environment is great - I know how to implement algoritms and persistence-framework myself, but that's not what I'm getting paid for. There's always some high quality open source library/framework I can use. And sometimes when I need the "unreasonable effetiveness of C" I will interface with one of it's applications via JNI, I've done this several times: ImageMagick, ffmpeg, OpenCV, etc. I also onload a lot of the performance critical tasks to systems written in C/C++ like MongoDB, Redis etc. But Java can be fast as well, just ask Cassandra and Solr/Lucene.
Java allows me to get my job done, quickly and effectly. And to write well structured, understandable code that most likely will be understandable in decades to come.
As I started my professional carrer I went on to Java, and I've never looked back. The environment is great - I know how to implement algoritms and persistence-framework myself, but that's not what I'm getting paid for. There's always some high quality open source library/framework I can use. And sometimes when I need the "unreasonable effetiveness of C" I will interface with one of it's applications via JNI, I've done this several times: ImageMagick, ffmpeg, OpenCV, etc. I also onload a lot of the performance critical tasks to systems written in C/C++ like MongoDB, Redis etc. But Java can be fast as well, just ask Cassandra and Solr/Lucene.
Java allows me to get my job done, quickly and effectly. And to write well structured, understandable code that most likely will be understandable in decades to come.