Choice of language was a product of my environment. Trading systems I worked on at the time were in Java and people I had pleasure to work with were java expert

Choice of language was a product of my environment. Trading systems I worked on at the time were in Java and people I had pleasure to work with were java experts. That said I have very little regrets. IDEs, debuggers, profilers, test framework makes it super easy to iterate. Java VM and JIT are state—of-art compared to anything else and assembly they produce is absolutely great. The only things I wish Java had is fast access to C libraries. On this project I miss SSE or AVX based string comparison.