My favorite jab here is that thousands of IT managers, after some multi-day infomercial paid by IBM, Sun, BEA or Oracle, decided they'd buy something that limited their developers to Java.

But really, Java is a fine language, not much worse than C++, and, as far as static typing goes, fairly OK. What bothers me most is the insane proliferation of bloated frameworks and tools that Java seems to generate around itself. In order to use several popular tools, you need Eclipse. It's not a bad IDE, but needing an IDE for even basic stuff like building a web app clearly is a symptom of something that went very wrong. Some wrong decisions are really hard to undo.