I've been using Java for about 15 years and largely agree with the article. The verbosity of the Java language is definitely part of the problem, although that aspect is downplayed in his blog post. I agree with the author about the culture. Java programmers in general seem to be on some sort of design pattern frenzy, especially in the better known frameworks. It doesn't matter if you're writing a fancy framework or writing a trivial app to process a file, chances are you're going to see layer upon layer of over-engineering.

I switched to Scala a couple of years back and have never been happier. Only part of the improvement is due to the language the other part is not having to deal with Spring, builder patterns, and madness like AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean [1]. My impression has been that the typical Scala developer has had lots of Java exposure and has learned from their experiences.

[1] http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/2.5.x/api/org/springframew...