There's a reason I put the phrase in quotes. I'm referring to the kinds of programmers that create popular libraries that people can make jabs at with words lik

There's a reason I put the phrase in quotes. I'm referring to the kinds of programmers that create popular libraries that people can make jabs at with words like "AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean". There has been excellent work in the Java community, but the community as a whole embraces abstractions, techniques, frameworks, and libraries that I would consider to be evolutionary dead ends that should be avoided. Incidentally, my favorite libraries and services in Java have little do with things like DI frameworks, ORM libraries, aspect weaving, or any other strange abuses of annotations. For instance, in my opinion ZooKeeper is one of the best open source services of its kind. Netty, while it has some warts, is pretty amazing and seems to show up everywhere as a dependency in other libraries and services. I'm not an expert on them by any means, but the Java-written NoSQL services like Cassandra and HBase seem impressive as well, and seem very competitive in their respective areas.