Java? Really? The JVM is kind of cool but Java as language not at all. There are other languages much more simple and beautiful. That's at least my opinion.
I have some bias from having started on it like 15 years ago... the key thing to me is the toolset : eclipse and maven and code generation templates and mylyn and all this stuff just makes it so easy - now sure you can do that in other languages, but the toolset is very mature, written in java primarily and also a lot of the really cool speed tricks are tough as heck to do with a dynamically typed language