> nor representative of Java as used outside enterprise development.
It isn't? I've turned down a couple of sweet gigs, at times when I really needed the comfort of work-group structure and maybe even a pay check, because I assumed that (based on my reading) it was all like that. I knew from history, back in the days when it was called Oak that it was a pretty delightful language. Then WS-* and Enterprise OO happened, and I assumed that's where it all went...
I write NLP software in Java and we don't have any of that crap. We have had a couple devs pass through from that world, but we have largely avoided any of the architecture astronaut crap that plagues enterprise development.
It's a shame that the name "Java" has become synonymous with it, since it really isn't a bad language (as of Java 7, at least).