The stable and mature ecosystem and fantastic tooling along with very low amount of library churn makes it one of the better options for anything server-side.
I've not seen a new project started in Java in a decade, and it's pretty far down in the StackOverflow developer survey [1]. Do you have some data to back your claim up?
Every language above Java in that list (except possibly TypeScript) is forced by the development target or domain. JavaScript and HTML are forced by web dev. SQL is forced by databases. Python is forced by machine learning. Bash is forced by targeting UNIX.
Also there’s no such thing as “an HTML project” or “a SQL project.” So I don’t think your survey link is telling you what you seem to think it’s telling you.
> It's less of a popular choice for new projects than it ever was.
Totally disagree. I think it was at its trough of popularity in the Java 8 initial release timeframe around 10 years ago, when many companies were still stuck on Java 6 and other languages had moved way ahead. In the last few years, since around Java 17, there has been a ton of enthusiasm and I think it would be the best choice for a huge number of use cases.
You're loose with the terms. Java is not "literally reference implementation", it's the platform language of JVM.
While this is a major advantage, Java has also its fair amount of problems, some of them unfixable (or rather, the Java team is unwilling to fix them). It looks like Java will never get a proper fix for the whole in the type system named null, while there are some great languages running on JVM solving that.
No he's saying that java gets the features implemented from the bytecode spec first. And you well know it, or maybe you have no idea and are just a kotlin fan boy...
