I think most of the problems are caused by enterprise, enterprise frameworks, and the sheer age of Java. There's a lot of technical debt built up and a lot of e

I think most of the problems are caused by enterprise, enterprise frameworks, and the sheer age of Java. There's a lot of technical debt built up and a lot of enterprisey frameworks that are way over engineered. I use Java, but I tend to do low level stuff, stick to basic I/O, Guava, etc. I think the article is right in one important aspect: the way Sun built Java was to pretend as if everything should be a competitive market. So pluggable drivers for everything. Rather than build in say, one XML parser, instead let's build in a whole system to allow you to plug in any XML parser. As a result, it takes 4 lines of code to do what should work in 1 line. On other platforms, Python, Ruby, Go, et al, there is no such assumption that one needs an abstract interface to allow multiple implementation providers. You have an opinionated built-in implementation, or you use third party APIs. This is why you have stuff like DocumentBuilderFactory/DocumentBuilder/etc. When really, you want to write: Document doc = XML.parse(...) Enterprise developers copied the basic design of having provider lookup/locators. This is why we have AbstractFactoryLocatorServiceLocator stuff. Where I part company with the author is the total trashing of OO and the language. There are certainly lots of warts and things to complain about, but I haven't used a single language where I didn't have a boatload of things to bitch about. I think you fall in love and there's a honey moon period with most languages, and then the beer goggles wear off after daily use and you see all the flaws.