You wouldn't need that size of a codebase with JavaScript...
Java was created (or adapted to) for the benefit of consultants. Therefore it requires complicated frameworks and you can not manage coding Java without an IDE. All this makes it easy for consultants to get long paying gigs.
Edit: thanks, downvoters! You are incredibly naive...
Therefore it requires complicated frameworks and you can not manage coding Java without an IDE.
Nonsense. I write a lot of java in emacs and use no frameworks at all. It's a simple systems programming language with an excellent standard library and great concurrency support.
While many people do abuse Java by plugging AbstractFactoryFactory objects into their framework for procedural programming, that's an issue of bad programmers rather than the language itself (which Java has lots of).
Then I guess you use your own frameworks and have a very special use case that shields you from the typical pains.
Maybe it is possible to use Java in a sane way. But there are for example best practice guidelines by Sun/Oracle. If you try to follow all that stuff, it will be painful.
Also most libraries for Java were written other Java developers. For example the other day I tried to send a simple Twitter update with Twitter4J (I think that was the name, might mistake it with another one). After an eternity trying to figure out how to configure OAuth with the AbstractAuthenticationProviderAuthenticatorCredentialsMessUpperInterfaceImpl (which requires clicking through several levels of the API dopcs to get the hang of), I eventually gave up and just used a 10 lines Ruby script instead.
A twitter4j update, taken directly from their webpage:
Twitter twitter = (new TwitterFactory()).getInstance();
Status status = twitter.updateStatus("hello from Twitter4j");
You also need a 4 line twitter4j.properties file containing your assorted tokens and secrets. It's a bit longer than 10 lines, but still pretty straightforward, even with the use of a (probably unnecessary) TwitterFactory.
By the way, I said java is a simple systems programming language. It's not what I would reach for if I wanted to update twitter either.
I had a similar problem - also dismissed Twitter4J etc. as too complicated and wrote a 50 line Java method to send a tweet (signature: tweet(tweet, consumerKey, consumerSecret, accessToken, accessTokenSecret) ).
So presumably it's the culture you don't like, rather than the language.
Java was created (or adapted to) for the benefit of consultants. Therefore it requires complicated frameworks and you can not manage coding Java without an IDE. All this makes it easy for consultants to get long paying gigs.
Edit: thanks, downvoters! You are incredibly naive...