This is practically a trope at this point. Sure, most of us who started off with Java 1.5-1.6 felt the same and Java was pretty much taken seriously only in the enterprise world, but in the last decade so much has happened in the JVM world.
In retrospect, as an early adopter of languages like Scala/Groovy, I really like how Java just waited and watched for a few years to see what was good in those languages and let them make mistakes on the way to building something stable and then adopted a lot of things that made those languages fun.
Java since 11.x onwards had been a great mix of developer productivity, stable core (other than people writing trivial projects, most people want something that lasts for years without random bugs), portability, and great tooling (specially from the IntelliJ side, as well as from the debugging side).
I'd much more openly recommend Java as a loved language now than back in 2010 (though Elixir is the new and shiny project I'm playing around with right now ;)).
It’s really hard to make intuitive guesses like that because we’re all so siloed by the kinds of programming work we do. I did technical screening for about a year (interviewed ~400 people in that time). I thought javascript would be the most popular language (because most of the programmers I interact with write JS more than anything else).
But I was wrong - the most popular language by far for the programming test was Python.
This depends. End of 90s beginning of 2000s I did an awful lot of Java as I was doing work for Telcos and they have wanted nothing else. Then I changed type clients and suddenly Java had disappeared from my horizon completely (well I did one more single nice contract somewhere around 2005 I think).
For my own products I've never used anything but native (well except browser programming which was Javascript).
In retrospect, as an early adopter of languages like Scala/Groovy, I really like how Java just waited and watched for a few years to see what was good in those languages and let them make mistakes on the way to building something stable and then adopted a lot of things that made those languages fun.
Java since 11.x onwards had been a great mix of developer productivity, stable core (other than people writing trivial projects, most people want something that lasts for years without random bugs), portability, and great tooling (specially from the IntelliJ side, as well as from the debugging side).
I'd much more openly recommend Java as a loved language now than back in 2010 (though Elixir is the new and shiny project I'm playing around with right now ;)).