&gt;If you are stuck with a group of developers who have no interest in learning anything new and wish to use Java until they retire then Java is the only choice.<p>Put another way: if you&#x27;re on a dev team where nobody knows Clojure&#x2F;Scala, and everyone knows Java, (and, optionally, the codebase is already in Java), and your team doesn&#x27;t have time for everyone to learn an entirely new language (including cleaning up the beginner&#x27;s mistakes that come with that process), then Java&#x27;s the better choice.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, Java grinds my gears sometimes, and I frequently wish I could use Kotlin or F# or some kind of typed Ruby in my Java-shop workplace, and I enjoy picking up the cool ideas from languages like Idris (dependent types are <i>really</i> cool!) in my free time. But I&#x27;m sympathetic to my coworkers in the environment where I work: 4 devs in the whole company, startup pressure to get to a break-even point so we don&#x27;t go under, and a backlog longer than all of us could finish this year even if we froze it now.<p>Sometimes circumstances require what looks like a short-term decision in order to ensure that there&#x27;s a long term to worry about later.