Are you kidding me? If it wasn't for large enterprise corporations Java would be long dead by now. Ever since Oracle took over Java has seen almost no improvements. The logical comparison is Java to C#, and C# has seen _a lot_ of improvement over the last 7 years or so. It just so happens that Java is sometimes unavoidable for Android development were Kotlin is not (yet) possible.
Java is, like its large corporate users, stuck in the past.
Version numbers are extremely arbitrary, and Java has a new number every 6 months.
If you compare Java 6 (2006) and Java 20 (2023), and then look at C# 3.0 (2007) versus C# 11 (2022), C# has gained many more features and improvements than Java did over the years.
Gaining features without bounds is not a positive in case of a language. C# is a very good language, but they really do copy C++ in adding everything under the Sun to it, and the complexity of managing it all can easily crumble under even good developers.
Java may be the other side of it, but I think it is a safer bet.
Including copying Java features like tiered compilation, default interface methods, compiler plugins, AOT compilation, being able to run UNIX systems, failing on having phone OS written in C#.
Anyone that misses C# on the JVM can use Kotlin or Scala.
And best of all, due to Microsoft's lack of investment on VS4Mac and VSCode versus VS proper, the best .NET IDE outside Windows runs on Java/Kotlin.
Some features were introduced in Java before they appeared in C#. But many C# features are yet to be seen in Java.
> best .NET IDE outside Windows runs on Java/Kotlin.
I would argue “in the world”. And it does not matter in the slightest to a user. The best Python IDE is PyCharm, also written in Java/Kotlin. I don’t know which PHP IDE is the best, but I’m pretty sure none of them are written in PHP, and the same probably applies to Ruby.
Java is, like its large corporate users, stuck in the past.