" it is a necessary side-effect of large ecosystems" It depends a lot. Java has a huge ecosystem, but almost all of the core functionality is provided for you

" it is a necessary side-effect of large ecosystems" It depends a lot. Java has a huge ecosystem, but almost all of the core functionality is provided for you. Like everything there's a 90/10 rule in that 90% of the 'things we need' really amount to only 10% of the total packages out there, so it actually makes sense that the people backing the platform provide for it. Language, compiler, debugger, documentation, tutorials, standard libraries etc. - it's all part of the platform. Looking at it that way, it becomes a little more obvious why even some cool languages don't quite breakthrough.