I'm not saying I disagree but for a lot of businesses (even one with relatively high traffic) it is not unheard of to deploy with almost no tuning of the GC (aside from setting a heap min / max of 2,4,8GB) and have no issues.
Try a Spring Boot app using Gradle as the build tool.
Weblogic and all those app servers were a product of a different time. They solve problems that are largely solved other ways now (you could argue for some of their features). Spring Boot ships the web server in the application which is more akin to Rails, node etc.
Maven itself is also showing its age (its 1.0 release was 2004). I won't say that most of the industry has moved to Gradle, because the truth is so many workflows and projects are using Maven that it will be around for a long time. The good thing is that other build tools like Gradle, SBT etc. interop with maven the package repo just fine.
There is nothing stopping you from developing Java in vim. Syntastic and other plugins will help though.
From what I recall, Java didn't switch because it didn't work. I think it switched because the green threads were built on what Solaris supported, and they moved to full OS threading to support Windows, Linux, Mac etc.
This basically sums up my brief stint in healthcare.
Every hospital / doctor wants to talk about the wealth of medical information they are sitting on... as you said most notes are just transcribed ad lib, or input into rigid EMR systems, there is no middle ground.
Also the language spoken by healthcare software is HL7 which is another nightmare in itself.
Java advancement is separate from JVM advancement.
Quite a few things (the invokedynamic bytecode for example) were added to the JVM that aren't even used in Java.
In fact Oracle has done more recently than Sun did in regards to hosting other programming languages on the JVM (see: https://github.com/graalvm/truffleruby).
This article looks like a fluff piece that is pretty thin on actual research.
They talk about how great MaRS is and how much revenue it has generated... but in reality MaRS has been an issue and has had hundreds of millions in bailout money.
It doesn't make as much sense for a webpage, but a 304 can be effective for an API.
Say you have a resource that needs to be checked periodically, returning a 304 still has the overhead of a tcp connection but not the weight of the payload.
Maybe but this also gives you more hosting options if you are in the cloud.
Also tools like puppet and chef for example have an easier time provisioning Unix like machines than Windows (although this has been changing, and the situation could be much better I haven't dealt with it for a bit).
Also you don't have to deal with licenses for Windows server instances which can be another huge painpoint.
Being able to generate a war or jar as a released binary is something that would be cool to see in the ruby world.