You can write awesome code in any paradigm, and the same is true for awful code. In a Java system, you know up front that the language is strongly typed and that everything will be contained in classes. (For the one exception, see the last item below.) The absoluteness of this design decision cuts away complexity and lends a cleanness to the Java language that stands the test of time. Well-written Java programs have the mechanical elegance of interacting objects; components in a Java-based system interact like gears in a machine.
Now, rather than abandoning its object-oriented programming roots, Java has evolved by embracing data-oriented programming as another layer. With the arrival of records, pattern matching, and switch expressions, Java solved its historical verbosity problem. We can now model data as immutable carriers and process it with the conciseness of a functional language. Data-oriented constructs offer the elegance of object models without the boilerplate that once drove developers crazy.
8. The JVM (better than ever)
Once viewed as a heavy abstraction layer, the Java virtual machine is recognized as a masterpiece of engineering today. In devops containers and serverless architectures, the JVM offers a well-defined deployment target. Modern Java virtual machines are a wonder to behold. They deliver sophisticated automatic memory management with out-of-the-box performance approaching C.
