The reason it sucks has more to do with the language and the culture that has grown up around it I think the culture is a far bigger issue than the language.

The reason it sucks has more to do with the language and the culture that has grown up around it I think the culture is a far bigger issue than the language. Java is good when used properly, especially with the Java 8 updates. I don't think it's fair to blame Java for the culture issues. During the 90s and early 2000s, an "enterprise" culture formed using Java. However, that culture used Java because it was the new, popular language at the time. If Go or C# or Scala was released back then and had the same position as Java, that culture would've also produced very bad code in those languages. Fortunately, the Java culture seems to be changing. There is now a more noticeable division between the old style "enterprise" Java code and newer, modern, and simpler ways of using Java. These days it's important for a developer to know one static language and one dynamic language well. And that doesn't mean just knowing the syntax. It also includes learning the idioms and best practices in those two languages. The actual combination doesn't matter. It can be Java/JavaScript, C#/Ruby, C++/Python, Haskell/Closure, etc. For example, I focus mostly on Java and JavaScript because I use one for server and the other for front end. My JS knowledge made it easy for me to understand the lambda addition in Java 8. My Java knowledge allows me to understand the advantages of optional typing such as Typescript and Flow. I've seen Java-only developers struggle with lambda in Java 8 because they've never written functional style code. And I've seen JS-only developers fail to understand how optional typing could be helpful because they've never seen the power of static typing in IDEs. I used to dabble in languages, but I don't have time for that anymore. I've found that focusing and keeping track of changes in Java and JS are enough for me. JS is changing with ECMAScript 6 and includes good ideas from other dynamic languages such as Python. I'm hoping that Java starts to get some of the best ideas from Haskell and Scala.