[bollockitis]

It's interesting how differently developers respond to languages and their ecosystems. While I don't love Java, i think it's fine. The documentation is very good and interoperability is excellent. Far from a punishment.

Punishment for me is PL/SQL which, despite its charming Pascal-like syntax, is painful to work with due to the lack of good tooling and it's awkward constructs (string handling, exceptions, etc.)

Honestly, despite its popularity, I feel the same way about Python. Working in Python on anything larger than simple scripts is difficult due to the packaging mess, the 2/3 issue, it's sometimes unintuitive idioms (think "".join(...)). Ruby is probably the most pleasant ecosystem I've worked with but I find dynamic typing a challenge on large projects. Point being, if I were starting a project in a corporate environment, Java (or at least the JVM) would be my default choice. Java seems to occupy a space where it's good enough or "least offensive" to the majority of the team.