[jimbokun]

Good threading support (no global interpreter lock or anything like that).

Very fast.

Unicode strings.

Some measure of type checking (probably appeals more to large, enterprisey projects). This also makes IDE autocomplete easier.

Lots of libraries.

Cross platform.

And yes, a large pool of developers.

Not too many languages can check off all those boxes, making Java a sweet spot for a lot of enterprise development. Probably not a good fit if you just want to throw together a CMS, though.