http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ You should check this book out and contemplate the generalities of programming languages. Java is the most popular example of a whole class of programming languages - object oriented, automatic garbage collection, no lambda functions :[, single inheritance, runs in a VM etc. etc. If you know C++ really well then moving to Java is easy and if you know Java really well then moving to C# is easy etc. There's no reason to hate on Java just because it's not sexy anymore. Also, there are a hell of a lot of libraries already written in Java and a hell of a lot of jobs for Java programmers out there.