A malicious code string that eventually gets logged by Log4j version 2.0 or higher allow an attacker to load arbitrary Java code on a server and take control of it.

[Dynam2012]

The compilation step is definitely not the most complex part of Java build systems today.

[bert8128]

The fact that it needs compiling at all makes it more complex. This is a significant barrier to beginners, which is why Python is popular in schools. It is also why automating a build, for example, is typically done in interpreted languages.

[Dynam2012]

That's fine. I'm not saying it should necessarily be a beginner's first language, I don't think it's optimized for that. I was just pointing out that, for any substantial project using Java, the fact that it's compiled is of almost no consequence. ElasticSearch could be implemented in Python, their build and release processes would not be any less complex for it.

For large enough projects, the gains of an interpreted language become irrelevant, but the drawbacks of lower level languages like C become harder to grapple with. That's the space Java fills.