JCjcrites·Jan 21, 2016
I'm skeptical that any other language will be nearly as easy write, operate, and maintain in production as Java.
It's really easy to administrate Java applications. You can connect to the JVM and examine what objects are in the heap, or request a thread dump and see what threads the application has launched and what they're doing. There are rarely any (JVM-level) correctness issues since code is safe and has a simple exception model - JVMs are rock solid and virtually never crash. There are advanced profiling tools available, and simple ones built in. It's easy to deploy applications due to Java's jar and class model. You can inspect a class and see its code as-deployed. Building Java code is simple, so there are rarely any build tooling or reproducibility issues.
Java also has excellent tools for logging and metrics emission, like Log4j
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/ Slf4j and utilities like Metrics. These are just a few of the system-level features that are critical in large-scale deployments, and in practice these elements matter quite a lot for managing production apps. The language itself is only part of the story.
The Java language has also been improving substantially. Java 1.8 launched a lot of great features, like lambdas, functional interfaces, streams, and other modern elements that give me most of what I expect from a modern language and allow me to write clear and concise code that is statically typed, in the context of really strong IDEs. Java's portability makes it straightforward to develop an application from any platform (not just the server platform you deploy on).
IDE support is crucial and frequently overlooked. Automatic code completion, refactoring, and inspection ("show all usages of this method") are essential to working on large code bases together as a team. Java also has style enforcement and static analysis tools like FindBugs, Fortify, CheckStyle, etc. Java's open source community is extremely strong - look at all of the work happening under the Apache umbrella such as Hadoop, Spark, and Hive [1] or Google's umbrella, like Google Guava [2] or the Dataflow SDK [3]. There are excellent concurrency tools like java.util.concurrent, Guava's futures, and Akka.
I agree with meddlepal on this one. It's hard to do better than Java for the backend.
[1] https://projects-old.apache.org/indexes/language.html#Java
[2] https://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/
[3] https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/DataflowJavaSDK