[reitanqild]

Totally agree. Most problems with Java are cultural.

It seems the more experince people get with large team efforts the more they value Java and other well supported type safe languages.

I'm a perfect example myself as a person who used to think that a number of other languages would be better but after having to maintain my own (yep, not only someone elses bad code, but also my own precious code) in a number of languages I've come to really prefer Java.

[manglav]

Can you point to some resources that teach Java "the right way"? Without the cultural baggage? I need to learn it for a new job and I'm inundated with resources that I can't determine the quality of.

[meddlepal]

JVM dev here... unfortunately there aren't any great holistic books for modern Java that I can think of. A lot of it is just community learned (e.g. put the XML away, stop making everything a damn GoF design pattern, stop trying to create mega class hierarchies, favor small libraries over mega frameworks).

I will say Joshua Bloch's Effective Java is something ever Java dev should have read at some point.