One thing which I noticed during the Stripe CTF, where Node, Scala, and Go were all first time languages for me, was that the baseline experience of getting a dev environment assuming you have a Linux box is, in 2014, really freaking awesome. I was doing Java in 2004, and think it would probably take me half an hour going from zero to "minimum viable Java dev environment." I was hello worlding after maybe three console commands in Go/Node/etc.

This is partly a technology problem, partially a philosophy problem (Java does not have a scripting language heritage which counsels e.g. having a REPL or really obvious options for program invocation), and partly a marketing problem. I rather doubt that anyone at Oracle has the job "Make people's first experience with Java suck less." Web devs thankfully have standardized on "batteries included; max five minutes to install" for new platforms in the last few years (Rails strikes me as the conspicuous first example, and ironically is harder to install now than it used to be).