[throwaywgsid]

Java is my favorite language now, but its power comes with a lot of potentially confusing constructs. The sheer complexity of the syntax is bad for beginners as well.

It's harder to create program that compiles and runs, at least until you understand compiler and syntax errors well enough to avoid them.

I learned Java as my second language after Perl and I remember how horrible it was to grok all the concepts at once.

At the same time, like I said, it's my favorite language now. The syntax, constructs, and standard library are built in a very sensible way. There's nothing I can look at in Java and say "wow this really fucking sucks" which is rare among languages. C# is the only language I can think of that definitely has cleaner design.