Let me ask you a serious question: Given that some people have been claiming that Java is introducing features too late or too badly for 20 years now (and so PH

Let me ask you a serious question: Given that some people have been claiming that Java is introducing features too late or too badly for 20 years now (and so PHP will surely kill Java off, and if not then certainly Ruby will, and if not then definitely Node.JS), how do you explain that Java remains the most commonly selected language for serious server-side software? I mean, at some point during an exceptionally long success streak in sports, the argument that the team manager doesn't know what he's doing starts to sound silly. If the argument is along the lines of "the market is stupid," then surely that's something that can be exploited. In fact, that was Paul Graham’s point over 20 years ago in Beating the Averages: if a language is superior then it should confer a market advantage. And yet, that's not happening to Java. If the argument is about momentum, then after 20 years of "surely this is the last nail in the coffin," clearly there is some misestimate of the importance of various factors. So to me it looks like either the purported mistakes aren't really mistakes at all, or they are but clearly don't matter much. Is there another possibility?