Maybe the commenters are "anti" and the voters aren't (more comments being also a detriment to getting to the frontpage)?
But I don't see any real "anti" comments, only valid criticism and I say that as a Java dev myself. It does have its wrinkles. But for it's age and popularity it's still a pretty good language.
In the first dot.com boom, a lot of people worked for tech companies, and Microsoft was the Google|Apple back then. Their corporate culture was dog-eat-dog nonsense, but it trickled down through the industry... and of course at the time Java was super super popular, even though _it really sucked_ back then (not so much now, it's quite awesome).
One of the most _hated_ positions was "The Architect" who usually rose to the top via floating on top of a bubble of attrition; so rather than being promoted because you're good at leadership or a great person that's fun to be around or a technically savvy and loved to teach... these architects were ignorant egotistical maniacal dictators that got promoted merely because everyone else quit. They turned static analysis tools into weapons of war. They made arbitrary standards that really didn't work for anyone, rather than trying to work for someone. Everything had to be over-engineered (sound familiar? If not, look at today's SPAs) with AbstractFactoryProducerMethodProducerImplInterfaces. I worked at a lot of these companies, and it just wasn't a fun time to be in software development.
Rather than people seeing the reality that Poor Leadership and zero charisma as the root cause, somehow people arrived at Java was the core problem.
A lot of the things were good in their intention; for instance, having the whole company use tabs instead of spaces (or vice versa) and having a universal code formatter have the potential to increase communication. But instead, it was just executed poorly at nearly every shop and the vast majority of the problems got turned into Dilbert comics.
That's not my experience at all, if anything I feel like HN is quite fond of Java. The anti Java crowd is mostly on Reddit instead where it's the subject of memes and jokes and the like.
