" However, we had a strong aversion to using Java itself, so the real short list was Scala or Clojure."
Sadly they couldn't articulate any actual problems with Java...
I find it weird that so many developers focus on the "writability" of the language. I mean stuff that java gets criticized for, like verbosity etc. Which I don't even find so bad especially since the newer jdk versions.
But in my opinion the _readability_ of the result is the most important factor. I rather read copy/pasted code than some smart clojure onliner which nobody dares to touch or really understands.
You only write the program once, but you have to read it over and over again when maintaining it and developing new features, and java's maybe a little verbose syntax really helps here, and also the fact that there really is only one way to do a thing (unlike eg. perl).
The tooling, documentation, frameworks, libraries and runtimes are all top notch with java. All other languages seem to have problems in one (or more) of these areas.
Sadly they couldn't articulate any actual problems with Java...
I find it weird that so many developers focus on the "writability" of the language. I mean stuff that java gets criticized for, like verbosity etc. Which I don't even find so bad especially since the newer jdk versions.
But in my opinion the _readability_ of the result is the most important factor. I rather read copy/pasted code than some smart clojure onliner which nobody dares to touch or really understands.
You only write the program once, but you have to read it over and over again when maintaining it and developing new features, and java's maybe a little verbose syntax really helps here, and also the fact that there really is only one way to do a thing (unlike eg. perl).
The tooling, documentation, frameworks, libraries and runtimes are all top notch with java. All other languages seem to have problems in one (or more) of these areas.