[iceboundrock]

It appears that most of the good changes are imported from C#.

[coldtea]

Most of original C# was imported from Java, so there's that...

[sjrd]

Or Scala. Or Kotlin. Or any of the other languages that had most of these features years if not decades before Java. ;)

[marginalia_nu]

Yeah that's very much an explicit design philosophy of Java, dating way back. Let other languages experiment, and adapt what proves useful.

It hasn't worked out in terms of delivering perfect language design, but it has worked out in the sense that Java has an almost absurd degree of backward compatibility. There are libraries that have had more breaking changes this year than the Java programming language has had in the last 17 releases.