I'm not a java developer but I find this generalization pretty ignorant (sorry... I don't mean this in an insulting way... maybe misinformed is a better word?).

I'm not a java developer but I find this generalization pretty ignorant (sorry... I don't mean this in an insulting way... maybe misinformed is a better word?). The JVM is an extremely fast system and if you run java on top of it that is fine. There is a reason so many of the world changing distributed systems (Cassandra, Kafka, ZooKeeper, etc) are built on top of it. I believe what you are thinking of our java business systems which are usually bloated/slow and developed by similar developers who think backends can be automated. There is trade-offs on both cases, if you can optimize for developer speed and sacrifice app performance that might be fine for your use-case. Software applies to pretty much every industry and not everyone needs scale but not everyone can live with poor performance either.