...and that is why the latest generation of JVM languages such as Scala, Clojure and Groovy are so popular. Java the platform is extremely stable, highly optimized and heavily instrumented. Java is much less verbose than C++ (the main alternative when it was released), but the times have moved on.

With Scala statically typed and verbose are not synonymous. Statically typed = high performance. Type inference and compact syntax = expressive. Best of both worlds. Languages like Ruby bring expressive syntax, but performance suffers. Performance is becoming increasingly important with mobile applications, one of many reasons Ruby adoption has stagnated since the end of 2010 (see open source contribution and indeed.com charts).