I think a lot of it is the people using it and certain parts of the culture. There are a lot of Enterprise TM programmers that seem to believe as many layers of abstraction and as much verbosity as possible with little tiny methods that do practically nothing leads to better solutions. It is totally possible to write concise and pragmatic code with Java. One thing that will be a thorn in your side though is null handling. The traditional approaches increase line count and branching. The newer(ish) Optional-based null handling is quite verbose but in width.