As a fan of Java I absolutely agree. Having worked with python and C codebases as well, I think every language has its own particular "degraded mess" version. A

As a fan of Java I absolutely agree. Having worked with python and C codebases as well, I think every language has its own particular "degraded mess" version. A sublanguage of hacks built up over years of deadlines, inconsistent bugfixes and evolving paradigms. One nice thing about Java (compared to C and python at least) is that you have quite a bit more tools to refactor and despegettify codebases incrementally.