> I keep hearing that Java is fast, and indeed hotspot is but every system I encounter that’s written in Java is sluggish.

Counterpoint: ElasticSearch and Solr are excellent, reflecting many hard years of work by the Lucene team. (I say that as someone who last wrote serious amounts of Java in the 90s)

Java’s problems are cultural and the experience really depends on whether you’re over in enterprise land with that insatiable complexity fetish or somewhere else where people are serious about getting anything done. The big risk to me these days is Oracle since they’re prone to milking their IP now at the expense of its long-term future.