To the author's point about friction: one of the things that I think has hurt Java is that some of its flagship tooling and frameworks have been overly bloated

To the author's point about friction: one of the things that I think has hurt Java is that some of its flagship tooling and frameworks have been overly bloated and complex. It's almost as if the more complex the technology, the more popular it became. Eclipse must be the world's clunkiest IDE. EJBs were pure evil from the first day. And, the most popular web frameworks have been anything but simple (Struts, then Spring, etc.). Contrary to what some may say about the language itself, I don't see anything in it that dictates tooling/dev stacks need to be so complex. It seems that it's simply the chosen architecture and/or implementation that's most to blame.