I held the same view as you when I was 22, more than 15 years ago.

With over 15 years of professional experience since then, my perspective has shifted: Java demonstrates its strength when stability, performance, and scalability are required (e.g. bloody enterprise)

A common misconception comes from superficial benchmarking. Many focus solely on memory consumption, which often provides a distorted picture of actual system efficiency.

I can point to EU-scale platforms that have reliably served over 100 million users for more than a decade without significant issues. The bottleneck is rarely the language itself, it is the depth of the team’s experience.

> Many focus solely on memory consumption, which often provides a distorted picture of actual system efficiency.

When other languages can do the same thing with an order of magnitude less RAM, any other efficencies in the system tend to be overshadowed by that and be the sticking point in peoples memories.

You may argue that holding on to this extra memory makes subsequent calls and reads quicker etc, but in my experience generally people are willing to sacrifice milliseconds to gain gigabytes of memory.

node is a notable exception. Compared to java node is a hellhole. the standard library is non-existent, most libraries are a buggy mess, the build system is horrible...in fact there is no reliable build system that solves all your typical problems in 1 app. The list goes on.