Yeah, but they're all being actively developed, so I'm not sure how much it matters when the project was originated. And that was just "off the cuff" of stuff I use or am interested in. There's other stuff out there as well.

Anyway, I'm not arguing that Java is the most active in this regard, just that this particular criticism - of all the ones one could level - is, in my humble opinion, relatively weak.

Don't confuse "development" with "maintenance". They are very different things. We see most of those projects merely being maintained, not radically improved.

True development is happening within the Haskell community, for instance, where they're taking concepts from various fields of mathematics and applying them to software development in ways that haven't really been done before.

Most Java-based projects are merely reimplementing something that somebody else has already done, or they're making minor, incremental improvements to a well-aged piece of software.

5 years ago was probably Java's sweet spot, in terms of cycles being used to help the developer, while still giving adequate performance.

It would be interesting to graph the average ages of the users of the popular languages; youth being a proxy for the (perceived) current best thing. When you're starting out, why wouldn't you choose that?