Russell Beattie is man with a point of view:

At one point I thought I hated programming because I was just so sick it… It turns out I don’t hate programming, I just hate programming in Java.

In fact, I’d say that many of today’s current hot trends in programming are a direct result of a backlash *against* everything that Java has come to represent: Lengthy code and slow development being the first and foremost on the list. In Java you generally need hundreds of lines of code to do what modern scripting languages do in dozens (or less). The general up tick in interest in Ruby, Python and PHP during the 2000s all has its roots in programmers who had to work on one Java project too many, and were desperate to find something more efficient and less painful to use. You all know the story - less XML and cleaner, leaner code - and once you’ve experienced it, believe me, you won’t go back.

I’d even speculate that the recent interest in Erlang is driven by these same forces. The same people who swore they’d never use Java again if they could help it are looking for a good replacement for it on the server. The one spot where the JVM has no real peers is in long running server-side processes that need to execute hard-coded business logic as scalably as possible. Despite the fact that the JVM is a resource hungry beast that’s ponderously slow to start up and happy to eat as much memory as you can throw at it, it’s still the only real game in town for this type of application… for now. The reason people are looking at Erlang is not because its beautiful syntax, great documentation, or up-to-date libraries. Trust me. It’s because the Erlang VM can run for long periods of time, scaling linearly across cores or processors filling the same niche that Java does right now on the server.

Really, that right there should be a clear indicator of how ill regarded Java development has become that people are willing to embrace the insanity that is Erlang in order to avoid using it.