10 reasons Java is awesome

1.  Easy to learn.  90% of Java = C-pointers+classes.  You come from pretty much any programming background and hit the ground running with java.
2.  Best and most comprehensive standard libraries.  Wheels of all types and sizes are included in the standard library and they all have pristine documentation.  Not to mention the thousands of external libraries.  In java you never write wheels, you combine wheels to make machines.
3.  Super Fast.    Java is faster than all other garbage collected languages and about 1.5 times slower than C.
4.  Very readable code.   Without things like millions of operators, operator overloading, and first class functions it takes a lot of effort to obfuscate and write unreadable/unmaintainable java code.  Spend less time figuring out what existing code does and more time writing new code.
5-8.  Awesome tool chain.  Eclipse is as fully featured as it gets, from ridiculously good auto-completion and code prediction...to detection of errors before you even compile... to plug ins and version control integration. Did I mention its free?  The only competing tool chain that is even comparable(Visual Studio) costs an arm and a leg.
9.  Application versatility.  There is a JVM for all major platforms sans apple mobile products.  Porting from one platform to the other is easy.
10.  Ridiculously good garbage collection. Competing GCs don't even come close.

tl;dr  Real programmer use java.

>>1.  Easy to learn. 
Easier to learn than C++ because youre not using pointers and memory management. Back in the 90s C++ and VB were the only options for programming anything, and C++ being a systems programming language was overkill for about 70% of what it was being used for, as it is really just a portable assembly language. Java has made things easier definitely while maintaining most of C++'s OOP complexity.

>>2.  Best and most comprehensive standard libraries.
Yes that is nice that Java lives in its own "ecosystem" so you dont have to track down libraries and dll's to do everything.

>>3.  Super Fast.  
Java is faster than most other VM languages like Python because it uses static typing and non-object primitives. An VM interpreted language will never approach the speed of languages compiled to machine code though, Java is about 10 times slower than C meaning that Java will not take the place of compiled apps like video games any time soon.

>>4.  Very readable code.  
I wouldnt say more readable, Java maintains complexity compared to C++. Its just a safer language, so that the programmer spends more time programming rather than fighting the language semantics going on under the hood.

>>5-8. Awesome tool chain.
The fact that Java is a VM language means you dont have to rely on platform toolchains.
 
>>9. Application versatility. 
This is arguable as to your definition of what it means for a language to be crossplatform. Having a language compiler ported to hardware is just as crossplatform as a VM ported to hardware.

>>10. Ridiculously good garbage collection.
All VM languages have "rediculously good garbarge collection" because they dont have to map to hardware, all memory is in bytecode