Java is not about the Java language itself, it's about the JVM. And the fact is, Java JVMs have been getting faster and faster. Also new languages, like Scala and Groovy can run on the JVM. I know people just love to bash Java, solely because it's the big dog. Syntactically, I prefer other languages, but the fact is, almost any problem that needs to be solved, has probably already been solved in the Java space, and has been used across many enterprises.
I’m kind of liking Scala lately. Clojure, too; it’s a more academic language, though.
“I know people just love to bash Java, solely because it’s the big dog.”
Well, I love to bash Java (the language) because it’s a huge pile of bureaucracy. If I want to get anything done on it, it’s 20 minutes to solve the problem in paper, a couple days to get it “just fine” under Java-lang.