Its strengths are maturity and reliability: a huge ecosystem, strong tooling, and a track record in systems that must not fail. Big organizations value that predictability, which is why so much critical business software runs on Java.
The trade-off is verbosity. Java tends to require more code than newer languages to do the same thing, though modern versions have improved this. For greenfield startups it's less fashionable, but for large, long-lived systems it's a safe, well-understood choice.
Updated July 2026