I'm not saying Java doesn't have other strengths. It certainly does! It also has stupid weaknesses. Many of the popular design patterns are simply lambda. I

I'm not saying Java doesn't have other strengths. It certainly does! It also has stupid weaknesses. Many of the popular design patterns are simply lambda. If you have first-class functions, they are trivial. But Java doesn't have first-class functions; instead you have to write a giant thing that looks like a class, and because that feels like a lot of work, it seems to deserve a fancy name like Observer or Strategy. But it's all fabricated work; the only reason you have to do it is that the language has this stupid weakness. It's as though you were working in a language that didn't have lists. And one day you realize, hey, it's useful to be able to manipulate variable-length collections of things. So you look at a problem and say "Aha, this is exactly the place that we should use a Collection design pattern" and you go write the entire implementation of lists from scratch and feel satisfied that you did a good day's work. You tell all the programmers you know that there is this great design pattern called a "Collection" that they should all start using. You write books about it. You give workshops. You get really good at writing list implementations, because every time you need one you implement a new list from scratch. When you tell a Python programmer this, she looks at you like you have lost your mind, writes a function that takes a list, solves the problem in 5 minutes, and gets on with her day.