If you're shy about managing your own memory and want to stay in a higher level language you could use the Quarkus framework or Micronaut which are Java on the

If you're shy about managing your own memory and want to stay in a higher level language you could use the Quarkus framework or Micronaut which are Java on the JVM. Kotlin is a super-set of the java language and also adds a lot more syntactic sugar. I don't have experience w/ kotlin, YMMV. The introduction of Lambdas and the choice of modern post-EE java frameworks really takes a lot of the grind out of programming in Java. With the upcoming data classes it's going to get even better.