Not sure what to say. This is highly subjective and irrational anyway. And sad, hence.
Having spent some years in college programming in Java around 2000~2004, I was amazed by the then patterns-obsessed ludicrous verbosity of Java projects. Programming for the sake of writing so much text to accomplish so little.
Switched to Perl & PHP, which were, for Web-based projects we had, much more approachable and efficient (although somewhat ugly). Hopefully, Python & Ruby were growing too. And alternatives to XML happened too, thank God.
In the Web development sphere I worked in, Java projects always have felt to me like too... enterprise, under-specified, freezed, too much developer-focused, not enough thought out, although advertised as "the" technology of choice - so it was deceiving.
Whereas teams working with PHP (!) or Ruby felt like much more concerned about usability and efficiency, globally and were delivering better and faster. Perhaps because those teams were composed of people grasping the whole product stack (hosting, db, code, ui) at the same time, because the tools they had enabled them better to do so? Not sure.
Scala & Clojure look nice. Have to find a use case for these in my daily projects.