The JVM is written in C, if thats what you mean by "is that still Java". I agree Java has its weak spots but I still feel it has its places (maybe I'm a bit biased as I do a lot of Java dev), the whole JSP, Java full web stack is pretty awful, I definitely agree with critics who say things along these lines, but for writing code that isn't just CRUD and actually does computations, uses complex data structures, etc I don't think any dynamic language would be replacing this anytime soon. (are people really writing large scale search engines in Ruby or Python, etc?) I prefer Java to C# as I develop on Linux and have never been into the whole Microsoft scene, so I think its a good alternative to the .Net world. I think the future of Java on the web is mainly for powering API's, whether internal or public, while other languages continue to take over anything relating to the front-end.

With java, you have tons of libraries for doing complex computing, the ones that come to mind first for me are search oriented ones like Apache Lucene / Solr as well as NLP libs, etc... Java no longer needs to try to be the "end all" solution, but are there other platforms that have the wealth of libraries for working with big data? (honestly am a bit curious about this)