[teknomage1]

Right, like what Belisarius said, java is a general purpose language that has it's own virtual machine. It's around the same detail level as C++ in terms of what you have to tell the compiler, but java has garbage collection so you don't have to explicitly manage memory for your objects. Java is object oriented and supports classes and inheritance. Java is generally worse than C/C++ for heavily I/O based OS level tasks such as recursively crawling through a file system. But in exchange for the elimination of pointer errors, this may or may not be a deal breaker, depending on your problem.

The second part of your question is somewhat useless in the abstract but is much easier to answer given a specific problem domain. For example, nothing beats Perl for text processing. Also, Forth is the king of minimalist stack based programming, but I certainly wouldn't want to write a web browser in Forth.