The beauty of Java is that is not ONLY a language, it´s three things:
1. A runtime environment 2. A software ecosystem 3. A language.
:)
So you can use 1. and 2. without having to write a line of Java if you don´t like it. There´s plenty of languages that run on top of the Java virtual machine: JRuby, xRuby, Jython, NetRexx...
Even Lisp and Cobol if you want.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages
There´s a yearly summit about new languages ported to the JVM... http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mlvm/jvmlangsummit/
H*ck, you can even write Visual Basic syntax and get it compiled to Java bytecode with Jabaco. www.jabaco.org.
FC
-- "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers." Richard Hamming - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_code