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Another poor attempt to compare a strongly typed static language to a loosely typed dynamic language. Valid reasons I suppose but unfair comparison and highly opinionated.

Ruby isn't "loosely typed", unless by "loosely typed" you mean late-bound typing. Ruby is pretty strongly typed -- once the type is established.

Unlike Ruby or other "language/platforms", the Java Platform now has many other options then just Java as a language. Mixing Groovy, Javascript and Java together all in the same platform paints a different picture. Currently, we use Groovy and Java almost in a 50/50 ratio, Java for heavy lifting, Groovy for rules, workflow & user defined business logic. For us, this has been a big win and a complete success for our clients. It's easy to see where Java as a platform is heading, or at least will be heading.

@killerweb: Give me one reason to not use Groovy 100% Then revisit the argument.
Also, for extra points; Try to separate "heavy lifting" from "the guys in testing can't learn anything new. The world has stopped"

I love Groovy, but there are times I need to fall back to Java for performance reasons. In particular, Groovy's XmlSlurper was much slower when parsing large xml files than Java's sax parser. That's one reason not to use Groovy 100% of the time.

Debugging. Groovy even with all the tools and some good debuggers, it's not even close to debugging using pure Java. Heavy lifting, there is no way 50 lines of groovy, even compiled, can perform at the speed of pure Java classes. Both of these problems are non-issues when it's used in a balance way with pure Java, but pure Groovy at this point is a little far fetched in large scale projects.

I process immense amounts of data, and need to fall back to Java for performance reasons... even a 20ms speed increase when multiplied by billions of iterations makes the difference between possible, and possible with a week to wait ;)

Some pretty weak arguments here and a lot of assertions made without any reference to supporting evidence.

That's not to say that there aren't reasons to dislike Java, I just don't think this article argues its points particularly well.

This isn't a post bashing Java, the dude is just complaining about features he wishes were there. That said, there's not alot to learn from this post. I usually enjoy the author's blog, but there isn't much meat to this post. I'm not down voting, but I would recommend skipping this one.

*yawns* another RoR zealot/zombie post...