[AnimalMuppet]

I think it's the libraries. They're like Barbie - they have everything. You need, say, to store affine transforms in your SQL database? Java can bridge those very different worlds. (It literally has affine transforms in the library.)

[cesarb]

> I think it's the libraries. [...] they have everything.

On the other hand, they need to have everything. In many other languages, it's common to just use a library written in a different language. For some reason, the foreign function interface of Java seems to have been designed to be hard to use, so instead of using an already existing library, Java developers tend to go through the route of "Rewrite It In Java".

[marvy]

With Project Panama, they are finally trying to make calling non-Java code easy.

[neeleshs]

Also because libraries in other languages often have platform specific dependencies.

[pjmlp]

That was indeed done on purpose, Mark Reinhold has had a talk about it once, but as noted on the sibling comment that is being fixed.

[imtringued]

It wouldn't be portable if it wasn't written in Java.