You can use XML in any language. No one forces you to use XML in Java. Yes, if you choose a crufty framework like J2EE or Spring then they'll use lots of XML. But you can just as easily choose a modern tools like Guice or Play Framework and not be forced to configure everything in XML.
Ironically, Java actually ends up being one of the better languages for that; there end up being a lot of gaps in some of the others. Just a $0.02 example: Ruby tools like Nori and Crack that are designed to make idiomatic Ruby structures out of XML but have fundamental flaws in how they handle niceties like namespaces. (Nori can strip them out, or you can leave them in place as the short-name string, but you can't normalize a given namespace URI to a given string, so good luck if some tool that was sending you xmlns:ns0, xmlns:ns1, xmlns:ns2, etc starts messing up the order. I'd consider making a pull request, but chose to leave tech debt in that part of the stack instead.)
> Yes, if you choose a crufty framework like J2EE
I do believe that using J2EE was exactly the suggestion of the GP, unless there is a subtlety in the usage that I got wrong (I understand the 2 has been dropped in later EEs). And are the ones you suggest "tried, proven, standardized" like I was pitched?
And the cruftiness of the standardized framework is the even-more-fundamental answer to the original question of why-not-Java: it's not strictly because you can't do things with it well or quickly, it's because it has a crufty reputation.
