As someone who used to program mostly in Java, but now works mostly in Ruby and Lua, I can say that I enjoy programming in Ruby and Lua more than Java. But I think I was still a fairly productive programmer before I made the switch.
I'm not sure how much of this is due to the languages themselves or the sort of overall culture of how software is developed in each one. You can have 500 character class names and factories that make factories that make factories in both Ruby and Java, but you only see people doing that in Java.
Since many projects end up using a lot of preexisting code in the form of open source or commercial libraries, if the language you're using has a culture of convoluted hierarchies like Java developers often seem to create, then you're going to inherit that pain if you use that software, and it will likely slow you down.
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As someone who used to program mostly in Java, but now works mostly in Ruby and Lua, I can say that I enjoy programming in Ruby and Lua more than Java. But I think I was still a fairly productive programmer before I made the switch.
I'm not sure how much of this is due to the languages themselves or the sort of overall culture of how software is developed in each one. You can have 500 character class names and factories that make factories that make factories in both Ruby and Java, but you only see people doing that in Java.
Since many projects end up using a lot of preexisting code in the form of open source or commercial libraries, if the language you're using has a culture of convoluted hierarchies like Java developers often seem to create, then you're going to inherit that pain if you use that software, and it will likely slow you down.