It hurts because it's true
Seen on LtU, in a discussion about closures in Java:
Also inner classes are the better and more 'java-way' to do closures
I can't see what makes them better, and if 'java-way' means anything then it must be a synonym with 'ugly' or 'verbose' or 'inconvenient'.
Miaow! Still, it's very true.
Java really is one of the ugliest languages around. I'm not sure what it is, but there's a singular lack of grace about nearly anything written in Java, and every way of doing things. Now, the world is full of ugly and inelegant code; Perl has made obfuscation-by-default into an art form and Visual Basic is never going to look like a real language no matter how much it grows up. But the inescapable fact of Java is that it seems to take the worst elements of syntax from all its influences.
Edit: In a fit of post-publishing research (the best kind, I'm sure you'll agree) I decided to check out Ada. I had a feeling that a language designed by and for the US military would not look pretty. And I was not disappointed. This "Hello, world" snippet is from the Wikipedia page:
with Ada.Text_IO; procedure Hello is begin Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line("Hello, world!"); end Hello;