[kvtrew76557]

Still quite far behind what is provided by C# and Scala, among others. At least it's a step in the right direction. These are the first major language changes to Java in nearly a decade, say what you like about Oracle, but at least they have the funds to develop Java whereas Sun was running on empty.

[SwellJoe]

And, yet, one of the languages you've mentioned (Scala), and many other languages that have moved faster than Java (most of the ones in common usage today, in fact) have far smaller budgets than even Sun was able to throw at Java. Does it really take such a large budget to improve Java? Why does it take so much larger a budget than, say, Go or Haskell or Python or Scala?

[RyanZAG]

Java is very heavily set on backwards compatibility - no new feature is allowed to affect existing code and any new features must fit into the existing features. This is different to Python for example where they had backwards incompatible changes in v3.

Another issue is the depth of the process on each change: there are a number of discussions on each feature with multiple proposals to determine the best way to implement any feature and how it will fit in, etc. The number of companies and people involved in the feature design and implementation in each change is generally an order of magnitude greater than those other languages.

Comes down to heavy bureaucracy and design by committee creating a very long process - but the end result is generally extremely well thought through and tested, so I'm personally not complaining since I'm not footing the bill.