I used to be a Java hater (I'm much more neutral now -- I even find aspects of it pretty pleasant). To me, it was never about the technology of Java (always been pretty impressive), or even the language (a little verbose -- but so is C++ and C# and I like both of those), it was really just about the ecosystem. For whatever reason 2000s era java had soo many libraries that were just insanely over-engineered and had these absurdly deep object taxonomies and trying to figure out how to do something came down to figuring out how 5 or 6 different classes interrelated. It was such a nightmare, especially since the IDEs back then weren't as smart as they are right now. I think it's become a lot better now though, modern libraries seem to have learned a lot of those lessons, and having proper closures makes a huge difference, and things like IntelliJ are really great about making dealing with the verbosity much easier.