I've worked in "enterprise" and have a different experience. The enterprise projects that I was working on switched to Java 8 in 2015. There were some legacy se

I've worked in "enterprise" and have a different experience. The enterprise projects that I was working on switched to Java 8 in 2015. There were some legacy services that remained on 5 or 6 for a while, but they were mostly in "maintenance" mode and nobody wanted to spend time on them. I have over two decades of experience and there has always been room for trying out the "new" technologies and keeping up with the latest best practices, even in enterprise. I know that not everyone has this experience, but there are actually a lot that happens outside slow big American legacy companies... In my current startup we use the latest JVM and have a mix of Java and Kotlin. It works really well and we have never experienced any problems with development speed that was related to code or language syntax. JVM + Spring boot + Postgres may be the "boring" choice, but it has enabled us to focus on getting things done and focusing on the product. It didn't take long for juniors to be productive in our stack either. Spring itself looks a bit scary at first sight, but once you learned the basic philosophy you have less issues than a Node project in my experience. I know that my experience may not match your experience, so I recognize that I can't make a generic statement. It's just a bit frustrating to see similar statements made by people with bad experiences. - Not all Java development happens in enterprise. There is a thriving eco system of small to middle sized companies and startups using Java - Not all enterprises are the same. I've actually noticed a shift to the other extreme, where enterprise uses the latest technologies to attract new employees. Nobody who has a choice wants to work with factory patterns on an old version of Java - Old Java patterns like factories and extreme use of inheritance is out of fashion. There is of course a lag like in any trends, but remember that Java is so widely used so you will always find companies that are slow to adopt, or have legacy software that is in maintenance mode.