OP shows a really strange prejudice against Java. I've been a Java developer for 10 years. The syntax of Java is a bit more hairy than other languages but the IDE and library support is much better. It is high performance, established and actually extremely easy to write once you are used to it. The syntax of other languages is a bit friendly and I personally prefer dynamic languages, but there is Groovy for that. Remember - 90% of coding work is design, 10% is typing code. Language doesn't matter as much as many people think.