You're really underestimating the power of Java's boring workhorse methodology. If you're looking for love there's a lot of other languages that are more pure and more beautiful for certain use cases.

However, there's a reason Java is in the top 3 most popular languages. Its pragmatic, it scales, it plays nice with tooling and the language itself is pretty passable.

> However, there's a reason Java is in the top 3 most popular languages. Its pragmatic, it scales, it plays nice with tooling and the language itself is pretty passable.

I wonder if those are true reasons. I currently believe in the following set of reasons, in the order of importance: runaway feedback loop of popularity (popularity -> jobs -> popularity), JVM is cross-platform, low cognitive effort per line of code written.

I'm not asking for anything fancy - just an example of a Java codebase that is "good" for whatever definition of "good".

I'm currently dabbling in Android development, and the few Java libraries I've dealt with, especially Android's own APIs, have been a thorough exercise in frustration, to put it mildly.

Where are the good Java codebases hiding?

I agree that the Android APIs are not good.

Have you looked at JDK itself?