What people rarely acknowledge is that Java has been gross largely because of its self-fulfilled destiny as an all-encompassing enterprise platform.

The Java being written these days with Spring Boot is as clean and readable as most other stuff. To say things have improved just doesn't do things justice. Nothing has reduced the complexity of everything enterprise to a coherent model the way Java+Spring Boot has.

It's also worth noting that the JVM isn't just great because it lets you write in these other languages. It's great because you can write Java and still use Akka and Play! and anything else that runs in the JVM.