Disclaimer - I don't even program in Java, but: > Language-exclusive build chain I'm not sure I agree here. Bazel / Make / Ninja still exist. Most of the tool

Disclaimer - I don't even program in Java, but: > Language-exclusive build chain I'm not sure I agree here. Bazel / Make / Ninja still exist. Most of the tooling that exists extant to that usually leverage some knowledge of the conventions of both the community as well as actual knowledge from the code itself (Cargo for example understands the module system in Rust). You kind of touch on this by mentioning "language-aware parsers" for dependency management, but this existed in C and C++ long before the JVM came along, so it's weird to place the blame there. Make has many things wrong with it but I wouldn't say that a "one build tool to rule them all" is something it did well. Even with stuff like CMake or GNU Autotools the final makefiles are almost exclusively used for C projects. I rarely see Make used in any other context, which I'm not convinced is a machination of language-specific tooling rather than some intrinsic property of Make itself. > Language-exclusive packages and repositories The proliferation of packaging systems is frustrating, but would you rather learn pip (PyPI) / cargo (crates.io) / npm (npmjs.com) across several OS's and platforms or learn 5 different OS / platform package managers? I know for certain there's nothing like that on Windows! This isn't the JVM's fault, and I think you're looking at it in the wrong order here. These language-specific package managers and repos are made to make the language run consistently in different environments. Most repository maintainers do not and cannot have the bandwidth to package everything under the sun for every programming language. > The OS doesn't know how to run your program Oof. The program you're running is the JVM, which as an input is taking a jar file and as output does some work. The OS knows how to run that just fine. Doesn't this criticism basically disqualify every single useful program that isn't a compiled C binary on Linux? ELF isn't that hard but also I'm not sure we need to tie all our boats to that sail either. If I'm trying to be charitable, I think you're experiencing a lot of frustration with your tooling and expecting something out of the JVM and programming in general that isn't necessarily true. You may just want to stick to C / C++ and tooling built 40+ years ago, but dismissing most of the tools that people use every day seems a bit "cut off your nose to spite your face." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯