I feel like that about Clojure. Love writing code in it, which often results in way less code that’s more elegant than a Java counter part, and admittedly sometimes can be a struggle where it would be easy in Java (which is probably true for all functional languages). But it’s always more fun.

Java is alright. Most of the frameworks you’d use with Java aren’t. If you can keep it down to the few great frameworks for Java, like Guice and jOOQ, writing Java code can still be a nice experience imho. If you throw me into a Hibernate project, fronted by Struts and JSPs, glued together by Spring… well, the fun factor goes down dramatically :-)