I think that the argument about verbosity is a subtle red herring. It's not that you just have to write slightly longer words to do the same thing. It's that yo

I think that the argument about verbosity is a subtle red herring. It's not that you just have to write slightly longer words to do the same thing. It's that you can't do the same thing at all because the underlying constructs of the language are lacking in key powers of abstraction that make it easy to simplify the problem you are trying to solve. You end up inventing whole class hierarchies and patterns to emulate things that are either just built into other languages or are easy to achieve because they offer more powerful language features (like reified generics, etc.). Java 8 helps a lot, but there are still fundamental weaknesses. Having said that, I'm still a fan of Java. There's no other language that I can sit down and reliably navigate through someone else's code in as easily - and that comes partly because it's powers of abstraction are so limited.