Agreed (although i hate Lombok myself, as being altogether too much magic; happily, standard Java language improvements now provide a lot of the comforts that L

Agreed (although i hate Lombok myself, as being altogether too much magic; happily, standard Java language improvements now provide a lot of the comforts that Lombok does). But other languages have quirks on a par with Java. JavaScript is quirkier, and Ruby is basically a DSL for composing quirks. I see two areas where Java fell more dynamic competitors. Firstly, Java does not have a great story about being able to open up an editor, write some code, and ship it. Using a simple text editor is too tiring, and the extremely sophisticated IDEs take a lot of learning. Java has never been well supported by the middle ground of Sublime Text-esque programmer's editors. Meanwhile, the standard tooling (javac and jar) is simple, but using it to get to production is cumbersome, and the more sophisticated build tools are not standard, and either verbose and maddeningly inflexible (Maven), or crammed with arcane secrets (Gradle). And none of them make starting a new project as easy as 'rails new' or 'npm create-react-app' (Maven has archetypes for this, but i don't think they ever got really popular). Secondly, Java does not have a really good framework for being highly productive at building webapps right out of the gate. By which i mean Rails. There's absolutely no technical reason you couldn't build a Rails equivalent in Java. I am astounded that (AFAIK!) there was not an urgent effort to do a straight port of Rails to Java once it became clear that Ruby was eating Java from the bottom up. Meanwhile, Java had Spring, but until Spring Boot, Spring was nowhere as easy and consistent to use as Rails; Spring Boot has helped, but by slathering another layer of even more complexity on top. I have never used Dropwizard, but maybe that's closer to the Rails spirit. The more 'sophisticated' frameworks like Play and Vert.x are not the answer, because they're so tied up with particular overly clever concepts.