> For reasons that I cannot comprehend, Java seems to be the only language that seems to have excessive abstraction as a requirement. Not as a convenience, not as a nicety, but as a requirement to do things like Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control, Unit Testing, Mocks, logging, etc. The fact that you need to use entire frameworks to accomplish the functionality that in many languages is covered by a couple functions in a built-in module is a mystery to me.

So what are you proposing? That everything has to be built in into the platform itself, hidden away from me? In fact, Java not doing so is a big advantage, because it allows me to change the implementation. Otherwise, everything has to be done by the platform developers. I would depend on their resources.

In the Java world, if something is worth to become part of the platform (either a new language feature such as try-with or a new core API or runtime library like Joda Time), it is discussed within the JCP. This created an ecosystem, where I can plan for the next 10 years and not just for the next it-does-everything-dynamic-language cycle-jerk.

BTW. If you want to reduce repetitve tasks, you should use code generation. That's the best abstraction and Java is a nice simple language to generate.