I tried server-side development in Java, didn't like it at all. I'd pick Haskell or Erlang over it in a heartbeat.
You can't easily build fault-tolerant distributed systems using only classes without concepts such as function purity and data immutability. Java's type system also happens to be neither sound nor correct; casts are everywhere and NullPointerExceptions can fly around. You're constantly working against the language to write safe distributed code. If Java was safe as a language, it wouldn't require so much debugging time. Haskell was an eye opener for this.
For systems programming I now use exclusively C and D. In the end, Java is only a viable option when you don't know any better. Most Javaland programmers I know of also happen to be blub programmers. They don't know unix, regex, functional style, don't write tests and the list goes on. They do, however, know Agile and UML.
Maybe that's what I don't like about Java. It's culture killed technical knowledge and replaced it with bureaucratic management.
You can't easily build fault-tolerant distributed systems using only classes without concepts such as function purity and data immutability. Java's type system also happens to be neither sound nor correct; casts are everywhere and NullPointerExceptions can fly around. You're constantly working against the language to write safe distributed code. If Java was safe as a language, it wouldn't require so much debugging time. Haskell was an eye opener for this.
For systems programming I now use exclusively C and D. In the end, Java is only a viable option when you don't know any better. Most Javaland programmers I know of also happen to be blub programmers. They don't know unix, regex, functional style, don't write tests and the list goes on. They do, however, know Agile and UML.
Maybe that's what I don't like about Java. It's culture killed technical knowledge and replaced it with bureaucratic management.