> The culture of it does. When all of the code around you is objects-as-design-pattern bad-abstraction slop, you're going to think that's the right way to do it. Which for a certain value of "right" it may be, but it still sucks. You can write "good" Java, but it's still going to be more expansive and harder to read than good C# (which aggressively trims back Java design pattern crap) or good Scala (which goes way, way further).
There is no "Culture of Java" that forces you to write over-abstracted code, and it's not really that much harder to write good code in Java. Java is a tool. Sure, it has flaws, but they're not so bad that they force you to write really bad code. With Java I've never felt forced to overarchitect anything just to get it to work. Of course, I have often felt constrained by the lack of expressiveness in the language, but a lot of that will be fixed in Java 8.
There is no "Culture of Java" that forces you to write over-abstracted code, and it's not really that much harder to write good code in Java. Java is a tool. Sure, it has flaws, but they're not so bad that they force you to write really bad code. With Java I've never felt forced to overarchitect anything just to get it to work. Of course, I have often felt constrained by the lack of expressiveness in the language, but a lot of that will be fixed in Java 8.