Let's be real: most people who make fun of Java aren't using a Lisp, and would also make a mess of themselves if they had to program in one. We use Java at wor

Let's be real: most people who make fun of Java aren't using a Lisp, and would also make a mess of themselves if they had to program in one. We use Java at work. Obviously all of the following depends upon your use case. The main reason we continue to use Java is probably legacy reasons. We have lots of library code. And we're a small shop, so every extra language we program in has a real cost associated with it. The stability and backwards compatibility is great. We have some libraries we haven't had to touch in almost a decade, being used in apps we just wrote last week. Of course some of them we've updated to use newer Java libraries (such as java.time and java.util.stream in Java 8). IMHO Java's biggest problem is the community. It's a bit enterprise-y. As long as you don't get caught up in that I think you're OK. I think the other problem was it went so long between Java 6 and Java 7. With Java 8 there isn't a lot from the likes of Python and Ruby I miss anymore. For imperative languages, I generally like Go and Python better, because I find them "funner". But once I get past myself, meh. I do think Go gets things a bit more right than Java, but not enough that it merits switching the language we use. Maybe if we had zero code and had to start out fresh.