Java is very simple and has, hands down, the best tooling of any major language out today. That is why it is the most popular.

Java isn't my favorite language, but even I can remove my blinders enough to see its strengths.

Say what?

The words that come to mind when I think of Java tooling is certainly not "best". More like "Bloated, slow, too-fscking-much-XML"

Name another language + tooling ecosystem where you can do ALL of: * Perform automatic refactoring of a 100k+ LOC project and be confident that absolutely nothing breaks. * Reliable edit and continue in the debugger. * Fast incremental compile times. * Easily pull in third party libraries without messing with include-dirs, link-dirs and whatnot, and automatically get the documentation built in and ready for autocompletion.

I won't list all other things you can do but no other popular language even come close to the tooling of Java or C#. C and C++ has too many different build systems and too much lazy evaluated templates and typecasts for the IDEs to handle well. Python, Ruby, JS, PHP...well they are all dynamic so good luck with fancy IDE features.

Do not go up against Erlang. You will lose.

Erlang as some pretty dope tooling, but still Java has a much larger selection and some low-level tools that are just fantastic for performance (JMH is one of my favorites).

Spend a week trying to get the project to actually run on a computer, with a project you haven't touched before...

XML? That's probable Spring. I hate that thing. But Java's tooling for monitoring is crazy good. The benchmarking harness that gives back the assembly code generated for hot code, unmatched on any other non-native language. The editors and how good hinting and auto-complete are, I don't know of another language that integrates so well.

Java really raised the bar on tooling and other languages/platforms have really had to drive hard to get just a close comparable place.

try spring boot. not a line of xml :)

https://spring.io/guides/gs/spring-boot/

A quote I found one time, can't remember who: "When your framework has a framework, there's a problem."

Whenever someone brings up XML as a critique of Java, they might as well be saying, "I haven't glanced at Java in well over a decade".

There's just no faster route to completely discrediting yourself in eyes of anyone who's actually used it recently.

Maybe you're a better programmer than you are a configure-r. But its tooling is insanely, insanely good.

Java had a full court press advertising campaign with powerful partners at a time when 'web' was the new thing and it was going to be that language. The superior support and tooling was a result and sustains it to this day.