Well, there is opportunity cost. Could the time and effort spent on Java be better spent elsewhere? It may be because I'm still feeling the glow Java had when

Well, there is opportunity cost. Could the time and effort spent on Java be better spent elsewhere? It may be because I'm still feeling the glow Java had when I learnt it in the late 1990's, but I really like a lot of things about it. It's a very simple, safe and easy to use language, it's C++ without the broken glass, it's C with automatic memory allocation, bounds checking and a nicer package/interface system. API's are separated and enforced. It used to be bemoaned as slow ("knock knock" "who's there" "................java"), and now it's seen as fast. That's pretty cool (it's partly because it's relatively faster than python... but it also has been made actually faster). Many early adopters left it for python/ruby a few years ago when the small language that Java was became uglier with extensions, esp generics and annotations. Perhaps an important reason people left is because it became successful, and it became associated with unpleasant mindless corporate programming. If you care at all about what qualities a language needs to have in order to be wildly adopted, Java has something to teach. Some people say it was just Sun's marketing... but Sun marketed it as a web language (applets), and it never took off there.