My experience with Java has been frustrating, I think it has a lot to do with what you need to know to get started. If you want to play with a language, check out how to build a quick API, you need to know a lot more than Ruby, Python or NodeJS. You need to know at least a little about Maven, a little about the build process, and for me it was more than I really wanted to do.

I pushed through learning a little about the JVM to learn some Clojure but I felt like I was troubleshooting things that I frankly didn't want to learn about. The pros didn't out number the cons for me.