[tpolecat]

I have been doing Java for a long time, and while I personally prefer more modern languages I have found that if I have to load up and work on someone else's code, my life is much easier if it's in Java because the tooling (specifically refactoring support) is so good. So even if I inherit an old, awful, "big" codebase, I have a good chance of wrestling it into shape by pushing it around in Eclipse or IDEA, with some reasonable guarantees that I haven't broken anything along the way. So the fact that I'm not entirely doomed in this case (as I recently felt when I inherited 300k lines of very bad Python) is a good selling point.

So as a common-denominator for large codebases with average-quality developers it makes sense in the long term, although it's not terribly fun.