Java did it way too slow, and that is a significant contributor to it being relegated to "legacy" in many areas. If it waited for the other languages to
prototype stuff, it might have not been the case. The problem is that it waited for them to prototype it, refine it, release it, popularize it, and for their community to adopt it, before even
starting to work on it in Java - which means that by the time they had it, most people who needed it were already elsewhere (not necessarily off JVM, just another language).
Lambdas were a very good example - if you look at the closest competitor, C#, it got the first take on them back in 2005. Then a major refinement in 2008, adding type inference. By 2010, lambdas were idiomatic in C#. Java, in contrast, released the first version in 2014. And even then, they're still less powerful.
Lambdas were a very good example - if you look at the closest competitor, C#, it got the first take on them back in 2005. Then a major refinement in 2008, adding type inference. By 2010, lambdas were idiomatic in C#. Java, in contrast, released the first version in 2014. And even then, they're still less powerful.