[peterashford]

Java is not a bad language. It was written as a reaction to C++ - a simpler, more consistent systems programming language. In that regard it has been wildly successful. It doesn't really look like a dynamically typed scripting language because it was never trying to be one.

You pick a bunch of language flavour / syntactic sugar and say that Java is bad because it doesn't have those. Personally I like it because it doesn't have things like operator overloading. These are you own preferences, not inherent flaws with the language.

[tsotha]

This. I realize the perl people love to have twenty different ways to do everything, but when I'm trying to get maintainable code out of an average team of programmers I don't mind the verbosity and I don't mind the lack of cryptic language features.

The original java architects took operator overloading and the macro preprocessor out for a reason - you can end up with orders-of-magnitude more ugly code if those features are abused.

[peterashford]

I was a C++ programmer for a very long time (and a C programmer for a long time prior to that). The abuses of 'helpful' features like operator overloading that I saw in C++ code would be enough to make a grown man cry.

[democracy]

... and also this makes Java a great choice for large distributed teams of programmers of different levels of expertise.