I&#x27;ve always had some sort of mistrust of Java (neo-Cobol ohnoes!) but I&#x27;m liking it more and more. Mostly I&#x27;ve come around to the fact that static typing isn&#x27;t as bad as my young self thought (and can in fact be quite cool). The  verbosity and &quot;enterprisy&quot; and committee oriented feel are still a bit off putting but I&#x27;ve made a commitment to try some Java on a couple of weekends. Did a bit of research and there&#x27;s actually nice looking lean web-stuff, too (Spark Framework, Ratpack).
Played with the J8 features back when it was released and they are pretty cool.<p>Cliffnotes: I think I have discriminated against Java mostly on a &quot;religious&quot; basis. I think it&#x27;s a great time for people like me to give it another shot (especially if you have grown accustomed to functional ideas form other languages in the meantime).<p>The repo is an excellent resource, bookmarked.