&quot; However, we had a strong aversion to using Java itself, so the real short list was Scala or Clojure.&quot;<p>Sadly they couldn&#x27;t articulate any actual problems with Java...<p>I find it weird that so many developers focus on the &quot;writability&quot; of the language. I mean  stuff that java gets criticized for, like verbosity etc. Which I don&#x27;t even find so bad especially since the newer jdk versions.<p>But in my opinion the _readability_ of the result is the most important factor. I rather read copy&#x2F;pasted code than some smart clojure onliner which nobody dares to touch or really understands.<p>You only write the program once, but you have to read it over and over again when maintaining it and developing new features, and java&#x27;s maybe a little verbose syntax really helps here, and also the fact that there really is only one way to do a thing (unlike eg. perl).<p>The tooling, documentation, frameworks, libraries and runtimes are all top notch with java. All other languages seem to have problems in one (or more) of these areas.