[alextingle]

Java aficionados don't seem to realise just how obnoxious many of us find the JVM. If you live with it, and do your work with it, I guess you come to accept it as a fact of life - always there in the background. If literally nothing that you do uses it, then it's a massive extra dependency to add to a simple desktop app - a dependency that is often quite difficult to manage and keep updated.

[mercurial]

Re dependency: you probably have a point on Windows, but it's your choice to use an OS without a package manager to keep things up to date. I don't know about Mac but on Linux it is a non issue.

That said it does not do well for desktop apps due to slow startup, high memory use and lack of native toolkit. It does much better as a server side runtime.

[jamespo]

Although one of the best desktop RSS readers (RSSOwl) and two of the best IDEs (Eclipse & IntelliJ) are written in Java.

[mercurial]

Of these, I have only tried Eclipse. While certainly more full-featured out of the box, its speed, especially at startup, is really nothing to boast about when compared to Visual Studio.

[alextingle]

When I see people arguing about which is the best IDE, I think of this... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d-c4INM-Wk