It's the new COBOL! It doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, I think one of the worst reasons to use a particular language is because of it's po

It's the new COBOL! It doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, I think one of the worst reasons to use a particular language is because of it's popularity. Java did a lot of great things but I think its time has passed. The codebase that is out there makes it difficult to make any significant changes to the language. (eg. generics) It's lagging because its popularity makes any revolutionary changes impractical to enterprise customers (eg. Oracle). I actually think that Oracle may piss the community off enough that the open source forks of java start making improvements to the language. (eg. MySQL) New language features are being added to JVM based languages such as scala and clojure instead. This allows new ideas (i realize these are old ideas from a LISP perspective) to florish and reuse the extensive codebase.