[pgwhalen]

Agreed. And there are big answers of course: data science, web front end, embedded, etc. But when you exclude those things, it does leave a huge swath of "generic back end" software where Java has a large if not dominating presence.

[jpgvm]

Even data-science is limited to just the science part. All the heavy lifting is still Java. Between Hadoop stack/Spark/Beam/Presto/Kafka/friends pretty much all data at any reasonable sized company is getting shifted around with Java.

Even more so if you are using the "hosted"/SaaS stuff as the cloud providers heavily use Java for their data intensive services (though Google has more C++ than the others).

[pgwhalen]

True, I almost said "data science exploration" as a way to avoid this inevitable comment :). Java can't nearly compete with python (right now) for a certain type of data science programming, but you're right that a ton of data science infrastructure is built with Java.