Could you elaborate, perhaps with an example? Not trying to start a flamewar or anything - but I honestly can't imagine a case where Java is succinct relative to other languages. And as far as elegance goes, Java is so overly verbose and fixated on classes ('too many classes? there's a class for that!') that I have a hard time thinking of it as elegant.

But then again, maybe I'm just used to reading bad Java code everywhere, and you've been lucky enough to find the good stuff!

    runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {
        @Optional
        public void run() {
            // ...
        }
    });

And once you start writing something significant or that needs to work cross platform say hello to design patterns to work around the straight jacket.

I'll take Lisp, JavaScript, Ruby, or Python any day of the week. All languages have warts but to me it seems that Java has warts by design.

  public void saveAll(Object[] objects) {

	File file = new File(filename + ".xml");

	try {
		BufferedOutputStream bos = new BufferedOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(file));
		XMLEncoder xenc = new XMLEncoder(bos);

		for (Object o : objects) {
			xenc.writeObject(o);
		}

		xenc.close();

	} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
		System.err.println("File not found");
	} catch (IOException e) {
		System.err.println("Some other error");
	}
  }

An example from my library[1]:

    SqlCommandEx sql = "select * from person";

    foreach (dynamic p in sql)
    {
        var full_name = p.first_name + " " + p.last_name;
        var age = ((DateTime)p.dob).YearsAgo();

        //etc
    }
    //automatically disposes the connection

I once took one of Peter Norvig's Python programs (a spelling corrector) and converted it into VB.NET, just to see whether VB was as succinct as Python. Turns out it is:

http://www.stevecooper.org/index.php/2010/11/10/vb-net-and-p...

Or finding out that C# anonymous functions are more concise than Haskell. Thing is, sometimes these things surprise you. Languages do get reputations that are hard to shake.

Also browse some of the core Java source code to see really elegant implementations by him.

For the curious reader, here's how to do Java entirely from the command line:

1) install the JDK and add its "bin" directory to your PATH. For me this was "jdk1.7.0_02/bin"

2) copy and paste http://pastebin.com/R47bwDZx and save it into a new file called "test.xml"

3) copy and paste http://pastebin.com/Ut5dKBkn and save it into a new file called "ReadXMLFile.java"

- note, this is not my code. It's just a snippet I found from the 'net. Feel free to clean it up. =) My goal was "to get up and running as quickly as possible". Production code would be cleaner than this.

4) run these commands:

  javac ReadXMLFile.java
  java ReadXMLFile test.xml

So why go through all this trouble, when you could just write it in Python?

Deployment comes to mind as one reason to go with this approach; fewer systems have Python installed than Java runtime.

So therefore when you deploy your app, you'd have to either 1) make customers install Python, or 2) (more likely) ship the contents of the "Python27" folder along with your Python app, and invoke your app via a shell script, or something. I'm not sure.

I would like to see proof of this. Perhaps Windows has fewer Python installs, but I would find it hard to believe that there are more Linux systems out there with Java (which most distros don't install by default) than python (which more systems do install by default).

(It's been a while since I used either of those tools, so there may very well be other alternatives around now.)

Though working on a big project or just simply wanting to get up and running fast a good text editor or an IDE is so nice to have. I hate having write my own getters and setters, or just simple the psvm method.