lots of the code produced by the community out there is full of FactoryFactoryFactories and other typing intensive, mind-bending and ultimately useless abstractions (most of them not DRY at all either
So what? Why does the code produced by others in "the community" affect your perception of the language and/or tools, if you aren't using their code?
Whether you fall in line or not, the culture around Java is around writing code to a certain style. Agree or disagree, there's an argument that by writing in a style that is familiar to Java programmers, your code is easier to read and maintain.
If you're one guy off in a corner, write however you want. But if you're not, you have to take the culture into consideration. And if you are one guy in a corner, why are you using Java?
I just started working for a large enterprise corporation (one of the biggest financial companies in the world). We have a lot of old code written in Java that needs to be maintained. I've been trying to advocate new ways of doing things, but almost every time the other developers will respond with, "that's just not how we do things here."
Java has a very strong culture around it. I worked in academia and startups previously and I didn't realize that there is a huge number Java programmers who do nothing but program in Java. They aren't interested in learning new languages and will only grudgingly learn a new framework. Their biggest concern making sure the lowest common denominator can still maintain the (unmaintainable) code.
An example is unit testing. Our current "unit" tests start up a JBoss instance, connect to the development databases, and take ~5 minutes to run just one test. But I've been told not to waste my time working on anything more modular and that if I'm going to put in any time working on unit tests, I should contribute to the framework everyone else is already using.
I'm already doing it. I set up cucumber + webrat to run through some quick UI tests. I wrote a mock-object framework into the last feature I designed so I could test it. There's still a huge resistance to change. I'm just hoping I can show how useful it is in the long run. In the short run it just looks like I'm wasting a lot of time tinkering on silly side projects.
I don't think that your company's conservative attitudes are because of their usage of Java.
I think that "one of the biggest financial companies in the world" would be just as conservative and anxious about the tiniest technology changes with any language: Ruby, Perl, or Fortran.
The attitude you describe sounds like it has more to do with being a large financial institution and the type of place where software development is a "cost center", not a profit maker.
It is MUCH easier to show someone how something like a single 5 minute unit test holds them back from being bigger better badder. Unit testing should take less than a minute for ALL of them in a project to run.
Ask for forgiveness after you do something...
The other way to go about it is to 'gingerly' find the single ally, and build on that.
Because when we call Java "ugly" or "stupid," it's the community we're talking about. My room mate is an extremely talented Java programmer, and he can fly around Eclipse[1] like a giant rainbow steamroller[2]. He uses Java like it should be used, and it's great. But I don't think he represents the community.
He tells me horror stories of code he refactors at work written by people in his own office, or worse, outsourced companies, and it's bad. It seems to me that that kind of code is more representative of the community.
When you're going to join a project, you have a better chance of encountering code not sucking if the overall culture of that language is better.
Ha, if you are thinking that way, I would suggest VB.NET or C# instead. Why? I remember the first time I was creating an MFC project using Project Wizard, I felt like I'm a fool looking at a bunch of auto-generated text & having no clue what it is about. And once again, I was in the same situation when I was using VS.NET to generate code for my first ASP.NET web app. But I still completed that webapp without even knowing what code is for. Does that make VB.NET/C# community more stupid than Java? Does that mean C#/VB.NET should be the ugly & stupid thing other than Java? So, you should better have another way to explain that.
So what? Why does the code produced by others in "the community" affect your perception of the language and/or tools, if you aren't using their code?