Java is not going away, not for 10 years at least. Gone are the days when Java was slow. Java uses more memory than C, now who cares!. The flip side of Java, is that allocation/deallocation is blazing fast. This is a feature of most high-level languages now, and due to use of GC rather than explicit memory allocation.

Object instantiation and object-oriented features are blazing fast to use (faster than C++ in many cases) because they're designed in from the beginning. This is partially from good GC rather than explicit allocation (which is more friendly to lots of small object allocations).

Method calls are basically free, and in some cases faster than large-method code. The HotSpot compiler uses execution information to optimize method calls, and has very efficient inlining. By using the additional execution information, it can sometimes outperform ahead-of-time compilers and even (in rare cases) manual inlining. Compare to C/C++ where method calls come with a small performance penalty if compiler decides not to inline.

Synchronization and multi-threading are easy and efficient: Java was designed to be thread-aware from the beginning. Modern computers usually feature multiple cores, and because threading is built into the language, you can very easily take advantage. Basically an extra 100% to 300% speed boost vs. standard, single-threaded C code. Yes, carefully written C threading and libraries can beat this, but that's a lot of extra work for the programmer.

String class is intelligently designed: Substrings can include references to the parent String's character array (saving memory and time). String length is stored (rather than using null delimiters), allowing for many operations (concatenation, substring, length) to run very quickly.

Collections are fast. Java beats standard C/C++ in this area, even for most optimized C code. Something to do with the object handling, I think. Array copy is highly optimized. In the lastest 1.6.x versions, Java uses hand-tuned assembler for System.arraycopy. The result is that in arraycopy/memcopy-heavy operations, I've seen my code beat the equivalent in C by reasonable margins.

Java is most searched programming languages in StackOverFlow! Most enterprise domains specially Banking, Finance, Automobil are using Java EE extensively as it provides higher scalability and performance as compared to other programming languages.