Great article Ivan! It's always interesting to have an open discussion about those "sensational" topics. You've definitely pointed to many weak points of the other article. I especially like your Java code snippets where you demonstrate nice features like functional programming, type-safe querying in a DB and automated setters/getters with Lombok.

I have to agree with the other post that Java has lagged behind a couple of years for modern things like variable inference, lambdas or automatic getters/setters. But those feature are all coming into Java, it's just a really widely used language with many guarantees, so features are only coming in once they are mature enough. Thanks to records (Java 15 experimental), we now have data classes with automatic getters/setters. Plus there's variable inference (with var). Plus there's a "faster" VM with GraalVM... So many great recent features.

I honestly think most critics of Java don't know the modern Java. They only know Java 6 or 7 and don't know about the increased release cadence (we're now at Java 15!!).