[ljw1001]

There are some good, reasoned comments here. Java suffered through some unfortunate 'best practices' that tarnished it's reputation. Building is uh, suboptimal, as some have pointed out, but if you're working alone just keep it simple and it shouldn't be a problem.

Unless you're building something that needs to be (1) highly dynamic (like a web-based spreadsheet where you don't know the column types til run-time, or (2) true real-time software, you're probably better off using java. Some libraries do suck as others wrote, but it's the volume of good libraries you care about. In any case, I'd argue that in many alternate languages, the code you're writing so quickly doesn't need to be written at all in java, because there's a library for it.

Verboseness is a fact in Java, but a decent IDE shields you from that as well. With Java it takes a little longer to get things done, but (in my experience) you spend less time trying on performance, fixing problems in the underlying tools or language, or just dealing with your own bugs and keeping things running. Since most development is maintenance, you want to optimize for that.