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I think there are two things that drive the Java haters:

1. It's considered "cool" to hate whatever is the dominant and most popular language at the time. At the same time, once something becomes popular, it is no longer cool. So part of it is simple "l33tizm". It's cool to hate whatever is popular, and love whatever the newest thing is that not many people are actually using yet.

2. Various leaders in the FOSS community have done a good job at spreading a lot of FUD about Java because of political gripes about the fact that Sun has not fully open sourced it, and has not turned control of Java over to a neutral third-party. And many of the FOSS zealots (especially the newbies) tend to just believe and parrot back whatever the various prominant FOSS leaders say.

Point #1 is just a consquence of being at the top, so isn't likely to go away anytime soon I suspect.

Point #2 will hopefully lose any basis for being valid once Sun has finished open sourcing Java.

A good deal of developers these days dont understand Java's complexity, and they hate it for not understanding it.

Others have worked in Java for the web in 1998 or some other unfavorable past, aren't interested in keeping up with Java's change, and have marked Java permanently in their minds as a platform that doesn't meet their needs and so they hate it.

Finally the two get together in an unholy mixture of inexperience and laziness, and they call this the Ruby on Rails community. They tend to be younger, they dont understand the weight of serious software development, and they largely view the web through the eyes of a blog with tagging and Google maps and scriptaculous.

Erlang is the new Java!

Heh. Seriously, it doesn't matter. The commercial development community is, largely, an intellectual community which forms hierarchies based on demonstrable knowledge and skill but, as has been observed, also on 'coolness'. But much of what commercial development is about is, well, pretty mechanical. I'm a professional developer and I've often, in many ways, viewed myself as something of the 21st century's new mechanic, not much different than the guy who used to wrench on those new-fangled driving machines of the 19th century. By and large, I know far more than the average civilian, but the largest part of what I do is pretty repetitive, and thank God for it, too, because I need to make money, which mean I can't spend hours and hours every day re-inventing the wheel.

Java is work. It represents work. Mostly, it's C++ with garbage collection. Yeah, yeah, it's so much more, too, but for me, at the basis of it all, Java is just C++ with memory management, good object orientation, and a boatload of tools. Great! Love it. Boring. When my mind gets restless, as I find is frequently the case with *many* developers, I want to find *new*, interesting ways of doing things, new puzzles to solve, and I want to belong to the small group on the 'inside' which, in many ways, is no different than the psychology of many businesses, or even Hollywood for that matter.

I'm not selling Web applications written in Erlang. For one thing, most of my clients wouldn't buy them (though some might!). But Erlang/Haskell/OCaml are fun, new, interesting and cool. Interest drives effort and, who knows?, maybe the next Rails will be built entirely in Haskell or something. The O'Reilly will write "The Haskell Cookbook", "Programming Haskell", and "Hotdogging Haskell" or some such, and it will be the new 'cool' thing, the Jessica Alba of the commercial development world for awhile. Until the next thing comes along ...

The tools, the speed, the variety of libraries are all great. The clunky language itself is sadly past its sell-by date date.

What I would like sun to do is:

* Ditch all Sun's efforts in NetBeans and Sun ONE application server et al.
* Focus on the core platform including the Java Language (javac), the core class library (rt.jar) and the JVM (java).
* Disband the JCP and take control of Java again so that we don't have another "Annotation Horror" spec.
* Get a damn visionary in place for the Java language. They never quite replaced Bill Joy, nor recovered from his leaving.

...Or just open source the thing, preferrably under an MIT/BSD or Apache style license. Stay clear of the GPL/LGPL.

Clinton

People must really love good fights. Each time I post a rant, it gets twice the number of visits of a technical blog entry.

Not that I do that too often, but the crowd behaviour still amazes me.

The language is fine... Why is stability a bad thing? Look at mathematics, do you hear anyone complaining "Oh my goodness, the addition operation is so BORING!" Javas iteration from C++ is a good thing imo, they didn't try to reinvent the wheel, just fix the problem areas.

I do think annotations were a mistake, I think they need some careful redefining before everyone and their mother re-implements everything as an annotation.