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.

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
Just no. There were many other good alternatives, and you already had very nice languages back in the 80's and lower (various Lisps, most had all the goodies Java had, a lot of other advanced features, native compilation, gc, real macros, very well-written docs, portability. The only thing I can't claim it had is "easy to learn" (it takes a week to get proficient), but I wouldn't claim becoming a Java ``architect'' is that easy, as you'll need to read a fair share of "design patterns" book to reach that state - and 90% of the patterns presented in those books manfiest themselves naturally( http://norvig.com/design-patterns/ ) in more advanced languages, without having to coerce a single-dispatch OO language to do what it wasn't intended to be used for).