[zumu]

By many metrics it's an excellent choice, but I kind of loathe working with it. However, if you don't mind living in IntelliJ it's significantly better. For example, there's a ton of stuff that doesn't exist, except in IDEland like basic formatting support (this blows my mind). You'll also want an IDE to help you refactor since there's a ton of boilerplate cruft and footguns to avoid. Nonetheless, library support for most business use cases is nearly unparalleled, performance is strong if you can deal with GC and there's a million Java developers to hire from.

[re-thc]

What do you prefer instead of IntelliJ? It's great even for other languages e.g. in Goland and Webstorm.

There is formatting support via Gradle and Maven. You can even run prettier via prettier-java.

Boilerplate more exists in frameworks especially the older the 1s. You don't have to use it.

[zumu]

A lot of people get by using lighter weight IDEs or just text-editors for other languages, where a heavyweight IDE is not as necessary. The only thing I miss from IntelliJ when using something else is the debugger. JetBrains debuggers are great, though most editors of passable debuggers these days.

For formatting, the only compelling truly framework agnostic option I know is the google formatter (unconfigurable). The other options are either editor specific (IntelliJ and Eclipse configurations are incompatible go figure), cost money or are half-baked (prettier). Now I believe there's a way to use spotless (tied to gradle/maven) to use one of the IDE specific formatters across IDEs at the build tool level, as you point out, but that's kind of a different thing, heavy weight and working around the underlying problem. Compare this to gofmt, rustfmt, scalafmt, black, prettier/eslint, etc. that are fast, framework agnostic and require no boilerplate. Formatting is a solvable problem in Javaland to a degree, but wow is it unnecessarily complicated and fraught with decision points that can end up in bikeshedding committees.

As for boiler plate, I'm talking about language level stuff, like having to make a class and separate file for every simple data structure, then having to implement hashcode/equals for all those classes, etc. Where in other languages, you can just return a tuple or a result or what have you and get on with your life. Again, IntelliJ will just do most of this for you, but supervising my IDE in boilerplate creation is not a joyful experience. And if you skip supervision, you are basically saying the IDE is now a dependency and the correctness of your program depends on the correctness of your IDE. Not super great.

Anyway, IntelliJ is certainly an amazing piece of software that makes Java development more productive, but learning it, configuring it, etc is a whole thing. Other modern languages provide much better QoL features out of the box and have a much less incidental complexity that don't require an IDE to get around. That said Java has the best library ecosystem, the biggest pool of developers and solid performance.

[cryptos]

Prettier for Java is just terrible! It is super slow and buggy. Use the Google Java Formatter instead.