I have to chime in that I also feel that Java is much as you said. I wanted to write some reflective code, and it took me an hour (admittedly doing it for the first time) and 57 lines of code. Frustrated, I did a mock up of it in python to see what the difference would be. It was only 12 lines, and much more intelligible. It was also much faster to write, but that isn't a fair comparison since the research into the function requirements had already been done.
