<i>Lot of banks use them because they have a lot of money and choose expensive products. Java is expensive because it was built around Enterprise model</i><p>WTF? That doesn't even begin to make sense. What exactly is expensive about Java?<p>The basic runtime? No, binary JREs are distributed gratis by Oracle and the JDK is F/OSS and you can always use OpenJDK.<p>Application server? No, JBoss, Glassfish, Geronimo and JOnAS are all OSS and freely available.<p>Development tools? No, popular text editors like Emacs and Vim work fine for Java, and there are IDEs like Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ IDEA are OSS and freely available. Popular build tools like Ant, Ivy and Maven are OSS and freely available.<p>Web frameworks? No, there are something like 60 web frameworks for Java: Struts, Play, Webwork, Tapestry, Wicket, Spring MVC, ZK, etc., etc., etc. Most are OSS and freely available.<p>Libraries? I can't even name a "for pay" Java library, but there are freely available, OSS libraries available in Java for almost any task you can think of.<p>Developers? OK, you got me. Since Java is still pretty popular in the enterprise, there's pretty good demand for skilled Java developers, so they don't come cheap. But guess what.. NO skilled developers come cheap!<p>Databases? Either "no" or "irrelevant" depending on how you look at it. Java works fine with almost any database, including both "really fucking expensive" ones like Oracle and DB2, as well as the standard assortment of F/OSS databases: MySQL, Firebird, PostgreSQL, etc. And then there's the specialized stuff like HBase...<p>I dunno, I'll admit there are plenty of reasons to criticize Java, but I can't see how "expensive" is anywhere near being a valid (much less major) criticism.