It gets the job done. The JVM is a different beast than the one you knew 15 years ago. GC is not a problem (usually) anymore. Change of hardware? Change of OS?

It gets the job done. The JVM is a different beast than the one you knew 15 years ago. GC is not a problem (usually) anymore. Change of hardware? Change of OS? Want to develop on something else? No big deal, it's all on the JVM. And it's a pretty damn fast JVM. It's got an extensive library ecosystem that isn't going anywhere. Because enterprise uses it so extensively, there's lots of support for it, lots of demand for it. Amazon is big on Java- heck they hired Gosling last year. Java is stable, not going anywhere, and an easy choice to make. So yes, people are happy that it's getting better linguistically. Stop being a language snob.