It turns out, though, it’s still good enough for sealed interfaces and the like; I don’t have too many issues with it, though that might just be Stockholm syndrome at this point.
Maven is terrible as always but Gradle is generally fine. I use IntelliJ community edition solely for Java and it works well enough for what I need.
It’s not like Java is going to replace F# for me or anything, but I do genuinely think it’s more fun to write now than it used to be.
IntelliJ IDEA is genuinely great. It helps that they were the ones who developed Kotlin, and a fair bit of the actual language changes were gacked from Kotlin. (Or you could say "prototyped and shown valuable in Kotlin".)
They are still hampered by lousy nullable support.
You didn't ask, but Spring still sucks. It's not part of the language but it's a ubiquitous framework.
- how’s the environment? Build tools, dependency management, etc. it used to be a PitA back then. - how has the typing system and generics evolved to support this? Have they introduced any type of variance?