[madmax108]

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 ;)).