[mrighele]

- Dumb: you bet.

Java as a language is dumb, but as an overall platform is not. In a way it is a two-layer platform: you have the outer layer, a boring language that is used by a lot of people to write most of the code, then you have a hidden layer, that most people ignore, made of bytecode manipulation, runtime code generation and language agents that let you do cool things like adding compile-time nullness checks, generate mapping classes to avoid writing a lot of boilerplate code or good old ORMs that automatically generate your sql queries for you.

Such functionalities are not exactly easy and straightforward to use, but in my opinion it is a good thing: they are there and can be used, but for most programmers will be hidden behind a few "magic" annotations.

This is in contrast to other languages where the advanced functionalities are "all over the place" and every programmer must be aware of them (I'm thinking of C++ and Common Lisp for example).

If you have a teams of great programmers you may achieve better results with the latter approach, but for the average company the Java approach is better because you can have average programmers write boring code while taking advantage of a few clever tricks here and there by using libraries/frameworks written by better programmers.