[yareally]

People program in what they know and what gets the job done in the most optimal way for them. Learning a new language without a good reason past certain users not liking it is silly.

Plenty of people criticize Notch for using Java in all of his games, but Notch gets things done. It's hard to ridicule someone making so many useful things (well you can, but most end up looking like jerks lacking tact). Might not be in the coolest or most efficient language, but the results speak for themselves.

People use x language because x gets things done for them, their business and it shows results. People that spend much of their day thinking about how they dislike a particular language and its users generally are not the ones being productive with their more enlightened language(s) of choice.

[army]

Yup, there's no reason why you can't be productive writing code in Java if if you're willing to get over the fact that you'll be writing more lines of code.

I've been implementing a compiler in Java (not my original decision, but I don't think it was a bad one) and, although its frustrating at times knowing that some list transformation would be a one-liner in other languages but five lines of Java, it hasn't actually proven to be a drag on productivity. You have automatic memory management, a reasonable selection of basic collections, a reasonable selection of abstraction mechanisms, the ability to implement things like immutable classes, etc, so there aren't any major obstacles to productivity.

A lot of times when writing new code I wish I had builtin tagged unions, since I have to do it manually with a class and an enum. But once I've actually implemented a tagged union, I don't find that future additions and maintenance work on the code actually take any extra time.