If you want to love Java - love it for the tooling. IDEs are bloated but the integrated features they provide - like built in profiler(Netbeans), postmortem ana

If you want to love Java - love it for the tooling. IDEs are bloated but the integrated features they provide - like built in profiler(Netbeans), postmortem analysis tools (Eclipse MAT), the ease of debugging it provides - remote attach, JConsole type stuff where you can visualize loads of interesting stuff while the JVM is still executing your program, things like EProf that comes with HP JVMs - it can be turned on and off dynamically with low overhead and no changes required - the sort of data it gives makes it a piece of cake to figure out what is going wrong (it even tells you during the profile which exceptions were thrown and how many times!). I make a living writing and supporting Enterprise Java apps and if it wasn't for these rich set of tools, my job would have been a nightmare. (Before flaming me saying if he wasn't writing code so badly in first place, he wouldn't need those tools - I also support code written by other people and writing complex, well performing code still remains notoriously hard.)