I don't like Java although I have to use it at my current job. There is simply no other alternative that is both widely known and supported (think a lot of programmers and a lot of libraries). I see only 2 other candidates C# & Go, switching to either of them means significant effort and temporary performance drop for the entire company.

Java is a very backward language, at my current job we use Lombok to generate boilerplate code. Lombok itself is a compiler hack, I don't like it. Why is that Java 17 records does not have supports for builders or for "withers" (point.withX(3)), C# & Scala offer both of those things. This makes records unusable for most of my use cases.

The other hard miss is lack of named parameters. This either makes code very verbose or less readable.

And my last complain is about lack of support around Futures/async/await. Yes there will be project loom, maybe even in next JVM release but currently we don't have it and a lot of libraries will need at least a year to support it. So instead of await's I have to manually compose CompletableFutures into spaghetti like code. I really hate this. We propose to our architect to use Project Reactor but the idea was discarded (after all Reactive Programming is not very popular among "commodity" programmers).

If I had to start a company now I would probably also pick Java (or Go), my main points would be: - Free compiler and IDE - Good library support for wide range of use cases - Programmers available on the market (Java) or willing to learn (Go) - Good build system, static analysis tools, best practices, learning materials & stack overflow - Language is battle tested (sorry Haskell, Ocaml & Lisp)

Yeah this reduces it to Java for JVM, C# for .NET, Go if you are adventurous. If someone pick something more ambitious like Scala 3 or Rust I would gladly join that company, but if it was my own I would not risk it.