This is a great place, I think, to talk about ranting about tools.

The thing about human nature is that we really really like to feel right. We love telling ourselves that we have the ultimate truth about something, when there is really no ultimate truth. We can only get close enough, but it's advantageous to have convictions about what we think back when natural selection had a stronger influence on us. When it comes to tools, this makes sense, because we are finite beings and conserving our memory for things that are actually important is better than having information about how many tools work.

This is why I like to use my editor of choice instead of using an IDE. One environment that I can focus all of my effort into improving.

As far as languages are concerned, different languages are designed differently for different things. This seems obvious, but a lot of programmers don't realize this when they are talking about their pet language of choice. Realizing this is something that defuses me from talking about how language x is better than language y.

Popular languages like Java are popular for a reason. Java, in particular, is popular because it has a lot of features that make it appealing for writing business software. Most of these features are all about minimizing how much risk is associated with writing software in a business environment.

For example, Java is a managed language that runs in a VM. This reduces a lot of risk. For one thing, you don't have to compile your code more than once if you are moving to a different platform. It makes migration easy, which is very important for minimizing cost when it comes to expanding your business. Being a managed language also means that things like buffer overflows or segfaults are not really an issue, which is a big advantage for large business software.

Java is also object oriented. This is another big risk reducer: OO enforces encapsulation, which is very good when multiple programmers are writing code, which is what most use cases are in Java. It effectively disallows people from doing too much damage.

These properties make Java great at building big iron business code. And those limiting factors, the things that it enforces, are great for minimizing risk, but horrible for us hackers.

I don't know if you noticed, but we really like being in full control of our systems. It feels really good when you have something that works well that you made or you tweaked. Java is terrible for this because it's too safe of a language. It doesn't allow us to be in full control of how it works, which is why we don't like C++ either. We love simple and powerful, and that's not exactly what businesses like.

So yes, you are entitled to your opinion, jaggr. I hope I gave you enough reasons for ours. If you don't like our philosophy, then it's totally fine.