It has a state-of-the-art Virtual Machine, rich concurrency facilities (why does everyone forget this?), reasonable type safety, great tooling, and it operates within a diverse ecosystem of languages using the same infrastructure.

But yeah, I have always liked the argument of throwing a curve ball at the kids who were already programming in imperative languages. It also levels the playing field and those who hadn't had any prior experience tend to perform better without feeling so inadequate next to their peers.

Rich concurrency facilities based on pthreads and murexes provided by an OS, so no miracles here, just the same broken by design stuff.

Care to expand? I still find that Java's are some of the best concurrency libraries you'll find, among imperative languages or otherwise.

Java of today is not the same as Java from 2001.

Dijkstra's argument was more about Haskell than Java... well, except the trash talk about Java's origins, you can't change those.

"Someone in 2001 wrote..." click X