The JVM is pretty great. I could certainly nitpick things, but it's pretty great. Java is pretty decent. However, I would say that Java lost a lot of time and even now there are some decently rough edges.

Java didn't evolve as a language for a while and that left the door open to other languages and other non-JVM ecosystems a lot. As the article notes, Java 8 was a breath of fresh air, but it was minimal in some ways. Lambdas and streams were great additions to the language. However, Java 8 came out in 2014. That's quite late to the game, in my opinion.

C# is probably the closest competing language/ecosystem (albeit constrained to Microsoft for much of its life). In 2007 (7 years earlier) C# 3.0 had lambdas, the `var` keyword, properties, object initializers, the equivalent of streams (and really better), nullable types for value types (like int), etc. In some ways, Java has caught up - and C# lost a lot of time being constrained to the Microsoft ecosystem. However, in other ways it hasn't.

I just want a POJO: frankly, this has been a problem that Java hasn't solved and it's been well over a decade where everyone has known it's a problem. No, records don't solve it. In Kotlin, I can make a data class and it's easy. In Scala, I think they're case classes. In C# I have properties where I can say: `class Person { string Name { get; set; } }`. I can see that it's just a boring property without having to look at method bodies. If there's something special, that get or set can have a body to do stuff and it becomes really clear that it's something special. Getters and setters are a wonderful way to set traps for others on your team or for yourself a year later because you look at a class with 15 items and it's going to have 90 lines of getters/setters + another 30 lines of an empty line between each method. You look and just decide "yea, I'm sure this doesn't have special behavior" and go about your business just to get bitten later.

I want to be able to instantiate data easily: With Java, I can do `var person = new Person(); person.setName("Johnny");`, but that becomes pretty tedious and error-prone when instantiating a large object. With records you have a constructor, but then you're dealing with positional arguments and it's hard to understand. When reading the code, you don't necessarily know what each of the inputs means. Maybe your IDE puts the argument names in. When filling it out, I've found IDEs to only be somewhat helpful. With C#, I can do `new Person { }` and then hit the suggestion key combo inside the brackets in my IDE and it'll offer to fill out all the properties so that I get something like:

new Person {
Name = "",
Age = 0,
Address = ""
}

That means I don't forget about fields (as can happen if you're just doing `person.setX()` all the time). It's easy to see what is what when reading it. I can delete fields I don't want to initialize at the time. Yes, maybe immutable objects are the One True Way, but C# lets me choose (I can label properties with an initializer `init` rather than a setter `set` and then they're immutable).

Kotlin offers stuff like this too because it's really useful toward creating code that's easy to create and maintain. Go also lets you initialize structs in a similar fashion.

Java has come back to us a decade or more late with records. They're not bad, but they're only offering one thing. They don't cover what C#, Kotlin, Go, and other languages have offered for so long.

The annoying thing about Java is that it doesn't feel pragmatic a lot of the time. It feels like the language hates stealing ideas from others. It's Java: people steal ideas from Java, not the other way around. People do crazy things just to get POJOs including Immutables (http://immutables.github.io), AutoValue (https://github.com/google/auto/), Lombok (https://projectlombok.org), Joda Beans (https://www.joda.org/joda-beans/), and maybe more. They generate lots of code at compile time or do funky runtime stuff.

It just feels like Java misses the pragmatic stuff and still kinda doesn't want to handle that. I feel a bit silly harping on things like POJOs and setting data on a new object, but that's a big part of day-to-day stuff and it definitely pushes users away from Java towards languages that seem "better" simply because they don't have Java's oddly strong attachment to not offering simple value objects. Yes, again, records do something - but it feels like Java ignored how people are using Kotlin, Go, C#, and more and didn't go for something that would have been as widely applicable and pragmatic as it could have been.

Java has a lot of great stuff like great GCs (yes), lots of cool research, great performance, and Project Loom is really exciting. I just wish the language would lean a little more practical.