Nekkoru wrote:

I have yet to see a good example of Java on a website. Or anywhere, really.

You have seen it, you're just not aware of it. The days in which Java basically meant applets on a websites are long gone. That market has unfortunately been claimed by Flash, Silverlight and similarly crappy, proprietary junk. Today the vast majority of Java applications are running not on but behind websites, whether it's dynamically generating HTML with JSP or extending web server capabilities with Servlets. Java is also the most commonly used language for application servers thanks to things like Apache Tomcat or JBoss. And it runs on countless embedded devices that you never even know are there, as well as cell phones and PDAs. Granted, despite notable exceptions like Azureus, Java is still a niche language for desktop application development, but other than that, it's pretty much everywhere.

One reason for Java's omnipresence, by the way, is precisely because it's not just Yet Another Interpreted Language like Python or Ruby, which are both exquisite languages in their own way, but whose interpreters lack important features the JVM offers, such as its sandbox security system. There's a reason both Python and Ruby have native Java implementations, Jython and JRuby, that allow programs written in each respective language to run on any computer that has a JVM installed.

The other reason for Java's widespread success and why so many programmers choose the language is the impressive technology stack shown in the picture above. All those readily available libraries let you focus on the problem at hand instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time. Sure, the number of different packages and editions may seem confusing, but at the end of the day the time you save by having them far exceeds the time you have to invest to get to know them and the way they work together.