True it's unfair to blame Java alone for these, because client side is more difficult-- we've been searching for solutions for decades in a variety of languages.

Modern front-end is a mush of dozens of tools/contexts, etc. Way more complex than TeX, and way less reliable and with minimal debugging context. But as the Eve guys have said, we're using the same layering of precompilers and interpreters we've always done. It's a mess because it's not just Java (or Python or Ruby) it's CSS HTML JS XML JSON, and the whole rest of the alphabet soup.

It's about time we reconsider platform as a whole again rather than merely a sum of fragments. That's why I find Eve interesting.

I get the hate from the frameworks craze, but if one is in a position of being forced a crazy bloated framework without recourse that's not Java fault.

apart from that, you can debug servers the other side of the world with ease, hot replace code as you execute it, walk the heap with a lot of different views available, it has recently got top notch profiling, a sane injection and inversion of control framework which you can still debug at runtime, all the libraries you can dream of and bridges to hardware for the most demanding tasks.