I hate it because it serves no purpose. It was originally aimed at mobile devices but as embedded devices are now closer to traditional computers, there's no need for it. Java applets are dead and have been for quite some time. It's not low-level or efficient enough to make anything like a server or a CPU-intensive application. 'Swing' is a joke and GUI applications written in Java don't have a native look-and-feel and they're not accessible.
The only selling point is that it's 'cross-platform', but so is C. I'd rather spend an extra ten minutes cross-compiling than expect Java to 'compile once, run everywhere.' Plus there are cross platform toolkits like Tk and GTK+ that work natively across all platforms and architectures.
Also 'object-oriented' programming languages are terrible by design since they don't compare with how computers actually work at a machine level, and they result in a lot of tangled mess and spaghetti code. Everyone I know who uses C++ or Java uses it in a completely different way from the next person.
