Java the language is almost irrelevant. It's the design of the Java Virtual Machine. And I've seen compilers for ML, compilers for Scheme, compilers for Ada, and they all work. Not many people use them, but it doesn't matter: they all work.
I had half my family that were farmers, and I was really pretty good at repairing farm equipment. There was certainly a period of time where I would have been happy to do that, just to be a farm equipment repairman in Dalemead, Alberta.
I didn't do programming language stuff in college at all.
I like to bitch and moan about lawyers, but they often have actually good points.
So in a strong sense with Java it was a learning process for us - there was some tech learning - but the most important learnings were social or behavioral things.
If you want to write the software to control the national medical system of a large country, Java is perfect.
