[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.