If you're aware of a language/platform with a better productivity/performance ratio, I'd love to know about it. I have not found one. The only languages/platforms that can beat Java at the workloads it excels at -- large concurrent server applications -- can only do so with great effort. If Java is slow and sluggish, then JS, Python, Go, Haskell, C# and Erlang are more so, and there's a reason companies prefer it to C/C++ for a great many applications. That Java is speedy isn't theory. The world's largest tech companies and largest non-tech companies stake many of their critical applications and a lot of money on it, and depend on it being speedy. Smaller companies (like Twitter, Soundcloud, Spotify, Uber and recently GitHub) regularly migrate to Java when they need more speed or better hardware utilization. So you're not personally convinced because you just don't feel it? That's OK. Those that need to be convinced are.