[OkayPhysicist]

Programming languages exist primarily to provide pretty paths for certain kinds of development, which is to say by the structure of the language they make certain kinds of solutions more natural to the developer, while making others more painful. Java's pretty path is large, object oriented towers of classes, with state scattered rough-shod throughout the application.

To be fair, there has been some effort to ease the insanity. Record classes, lambdas, and the like lessen the pain of trying to write Java against its original orthodoxy. But before that, a simple "sort list of lists by first value" method involved making a class available in the current scope that implemented Comparator<List<X>> which contains a method "compare".

As opposed to "sortby (comparing fst) list_o_lists"

[pjmlp]

Languages are orthogonal to the desires of technical architects, solution architects and business analysts, that control the helm of enterprise shops.

There was no Java when GoF book came out, CORBA and DCOM were used all over the place, SOAP was initially driven by Microsoft and its COM/.NET group (see Don Box), when enterprise architects get FP into the enterprise, scalaz happens.