It has fewer keywords than almost any other language, and the overwhelming majority of its library is written in pure Java. It has warts, like the way closures

It has fewer keywords than almost any other language, and the overwhelming majority of its library is written in pure Java. It has warts, like the way closures are broken, and the lack of map-literals, some native syntax map stuff would be nice too. Functional programming with lambdas, etc is in fact possible (and awesome, passing around Callables through java's excellent concurrency libraries is quite elegant once you get past the ugly syntax). Most importantly, it's IMO one of the best languages for team projects, the verbosity that people lament turns into a huge asset when you're reading other people's code. The interface system they have isn't quite as good as Go's but it allows really powerful abstractions as long as you don't go down blind alleys of implementation inheritance from your OO 101 freshman year. That said, the JVM aside, Go seems to address all of its sweet spots a little bit better. Their only lack is some sort of generics and I'm pretty sure that they've delayed implementing it precisely because of Java's ugly edge cases in generic usage. And if you're talking about EJB or any other enterprise monstrosity, sure, that sucks and is the exact opposite of 'clean and beautiful'. Or performant or any other positive adjective.