it all depends on your problem. for gui programming oo code is natural, for transforming complex data structures ml is natural. transforming xml is a horrible mess in java, so xslt is recommended, and xslt is pretty much ml (one of the creators of haskell was a contributor to xslt). it's not matter of java verboseness, even python or lisp isn't well suited to dealing with complex datastructures because they lack the pattern matching over compiler enforced datastructure machinery.