Java got to be the COBOL of the 21st Century because of the boilerplate & etc, not despite it.
Immoral MegaCorporations like Java because they can segment large jobs and have armies of drones work on the small segments. Immoral MegaCorporations don't innately like productivity, they innately like Control Over Employees.
Uhh... it's not immoral to want manageable code. If any piece of code would depend on the programmer who wrote it, or require somebody in the top 10% then I'm sorry to say, but a lot less software would be written. It's not a perfect world, but I tend to value a workable compromise over an unworkable ideal.
If you're going to implicitly say that Java code is more "manageable" than alternatives, then you're going to have to provide citations, or at least meaningful stories of your experience.
The most important purpose of higher-level programming languages is to remove accidental complexities.
I can give you dozens of examples where Java fails to do that ... as opposed to other languages, some of them mainstream. Some examples ... nullable references, checked exceptions (which are a class of their own), no compile-time code contracts (the type-system is way too weak), concurrency based on shared state and mutexes, public/protected instance variables (with a god-awful getters/setters convention), no real closures (an anonymous class instantiation only captures final locals), no multi-dispatching (this could take care of half of all possible Java-related gotchas, at least), no pattern-matching operator (switch doesn't count). And the list can go on and on.
I've also worked on "big" code-bases written in Java. Some Java open-source libraries are truly beautiful, but these particular projects were not. On one of them it took one whole month to fix a bug that escaped us because of all the layers and all the boilerplate that was executing. This particular bug only happened like once a month, and debugging multi-threading Java code is a nightmare (I guess it could be worse).
Sorry, but this argument doesn't fly. I work in a Perl shop and not all programmers here are in "the top 10%" (I don't think either of us are). But with enough training and clear code-conventions (many of them coming from our community) ... our code base is quite manageable.
PS: I don't have anything against Java or Java programmers. I actually like it because of the available tools, libraries and because of the JVM, which is state-of-the-art.
Java got to be the COBOL of the 21st Century because of the boilerplate & etc, not despite it.
Immoral MegaCorporations like Java because they can segment large jobs and have armies of drones work on the small segments. Immoral MegaCorporations don't innately like productivity, they innately like Control Over Employees.