Yeah, I have my complaints about Java the language (and mostly use Scala myself) but the tooling for Java development is really compelling. Everything just work

Yeah, I have my complaints about Java the language (and mostly use Scala myself) but the tooling for Java development is really compelling. Everything just works (IDE, debuggers, etc) and idiomatic Java code tends to be very high performance without a ton of special effort required for performance tuning. And if you do need to do performance tuning, the tooling for metrics and performance tuning is also amazing. One of the most underrated aspects of building on the JVM is that the runtime itself provides a lot of visibility into runtime performance "out of the box". If I do have to debug performance issues, I can just fire up JFR and get a ton of useful metrics about performance bottlenecks with no changes to the actual source code. I can even run JFR on my production workloads and get great visibility into the were the "real world" performance bottlenecks are happening.