Hard to explain. It's more verbose and restrictive. Ruby is the complete opposite, you can do anything you want. I know what people say about Monkey Patching but what Rails did with ActiveSupport is mostly beautiful. I can see the advantages in types I'm not denying them. I am just so comfortable with Ruby/Rails and js I never bothered looking deeply into anything else. The Java I did in college, and then the experiments I did with Spring framework a couple of years ago (tried a couple of todo apps) made it clear to me it's not my thing. Ruby/Rails made programming actually fun. It may have improved since then but I think even getting a shell (like Rails console) was difficult with Spring. Maybe if I stuck to Spring for months or years I would have felt differently, impossible to tell most of the time because we usually stick to what we like and avoid delving too deep into what we don't like. Spring was just a massive complicated thing, or at least that's the impression I got. People go on and on about Rails being magical, I suspect most of them have a very vague understanding of how Spring actually works under the hood. Not to mention those hundreds of Beans you need to get to know, I dread those! I can see myself doing Go or Swift, something not too verbose, but again, I don't really care for performance (it's not at the top of my wish list as a web developer) that much or types. So to sum it up: I just like Ruby/Rails and not a big Java fan. I know there are many other static languages to choose from but life is short, I am happy doing my thing with Ruby. If I have to jump ship it will probably be to Python.