[gravypod]

One-and-done is my favorite way of thinking about using Java. The JVM provides the perfect, for my use case, amount of abstraction from the hardware while still allowing you to do some amazing things.

There is also a huge amount of features that are supported by the JVM that Java still doesn't make use of.

There is also a great JIT and garbage collector.

[smac8]

Yes, but I suppose this is more the JVM than the language itself. The JVM is quite convincing though, hence Clojure, Scala, etc.