[Zak]

Java fills a particular niche (code with an emphasis on readability)

I'm a bit skeptical of this claim. While Java does remove many of the opportunities other languages provide for making a small piece of code do something unexpected, I've found that Java's verbosity makes it hard to see the big picture.

Of course, good programmers manage in spite of any limitations of the language, and bad programmers manage to write incomprehensible code no matter how much a given tool tries to guide them in the right direction. I suspect it will always be this way, and that's not a bad thing.