Java is a really bad language for getting things done quickly. I don't mean in terms of processing speed, I mean in terms of the amount of time it takes to write something that works.
Friday I spent a bunch of time writing what I thought would be a trivial Java program with some pretty simple requirements. My program was to open a stream to a URL and pump a file at it. Additionally, I wanted my program to do this continuously with a bunch of threads.
After about an hour I had all but given up. In that hour I'd had problems with ports being left open, and data just not showing up on the other end of the connection. You might be tempted to say "oh the fool, he didn't close his streams", or "what an idiot, he never flushed the streams". You'd be wrong on both counts.
I probably missed something, but you know what? it doesn't matter. Java just isn't in the language to be using when you need to get things done quickly. Java is a systems language, not a get-things-done-quickly language. I really should have written this in something like Ruby or Python. The only problem is that while I know the syntax of these languages, I'm not familiar with the libraries.
I'm willing to bet that I would have been able to get this simple program written in about an hour, even without knowing the libraries, and it would have worked, unlike my Java version.
