You only named one upside, I can't think of any other, and C-like syntax is pretty common, so it's not much of an upside. It's at least debatable whether the JVM is a good thing at all - the majority of languages get along perfectly well without it, and there's no reason to believe the ones that do target it wouldn't be doing just fine if it didn't exist. It's weird to say Java gave a job to anybody - the demand to have software written resulted in programmers being hired; if Java hadn't been pushed on the market by Sun, it would have just been another language. Java didn't establish any fundamentals at all, it just borrowed from other places. While all three of the other languages you mention are interesting, for sure, I'm not sure why somebody who doesn't like Java should limit themselves to JVM languages.