It has good tooling, IDE support, lots of people know it, it's fast, relatively easy to write, accessible from Scala, Groovy, Clojure, etc. Java is a step remov

It has good tooling, IDE support, lots of people know it, it's fast, relatively easy to write, accessible from Scala, Groovy, Clojure, etc. Java is a step removed from having to write a system in C or C++, but you don't need absolute control over every single detail (garbage collection is acceptable). Most development happens in Java, C#, or C++, just not on HN. There's something of an inertial effect with Java, where people continue to write Java because everyone else writes it (and thus it continually improves). What other platforms do you know of that have a similar track-record of performing in large-scale software?