[palindrone]

JVM runs on wider range of hardware. JVM compiler is faster than .NET equivalent. JVM has more programming languages tagetting it. these languages have much more mature libraries. Some of them run on .NET, but almost none of the languages from .NET runs on JVM. JVM has many many more man years spent on libraries, so Java libraries are much more trustworthy. And so on...

JVM and Java are much more reliable. Java backwards compatibility beats .NET every time. How many .NET frameworks do you need to install if you need software written in different versions of .NET? Answer: all of them. And Java?: only one. I've got 3 or 4 versions of .NET on my system because of this.

[joshyeager]

That's interesting, because my experience has mostly been the opposite.

On the server side, you can install whichever .NET versions you need and they will live together quite nicely. But you can only install one Java version, and updates randomly break things (that's probably not true in general, but that's how it seemed to me). And I can only remember a handful of issues that were caused by the .NET framework, we had constant reliability issues with Java.

Having lots of languages available is nice, but it's not a core requirement for a platform in my opinion. .NET has C# and F#, and they complement each other very well.

I haven't had any library issues with Java or .NET, so I can't comment on that.

My guess is that my problems with Java stem from lack of experience with it, and my success with .NET is because of my deep experience with it. So it seems likely that your perspective is for similar reasons.

[palindrone]

> Having lots of languages available is nice ...

.NET's C# and F# are actually the only choice. C# is old and at most slightly better than Java 8. F# is somewhat better (much more concise) but still behind Clojure, Scala, Frege, etc... I'll also want to mention here that IMO Clojure is now on the forefront of innovations actually implemented and widely used in enterprise class software. STM, async, channels, static types, transducers, etc... and all these things are so easy to use for a newcomer. Every other language have already copied something from it or is in the progress of doing it. When I'm programming in Clojure I can feel I can work miracles - things that are hard or almost impossible in other languages I can write in a few lines of CLojure. Brilliant language. I'd discovered it couple of years ago and I'm still shocked by its power.

[super_mario]

You can install as many java versions as you need (I have everything from 1.4 to 1.8 and multiple versions of each major version all on same machine). And they all live side by side. You use which ever one you need.