Comment by Sandman

I was recently at a Java conference where Juergen Hoeller (of Spring fame) was a keynote speaker. In one of his talks he said something like "Once again, Java is solving yesterday's problems". The moment he said that, I thought to myself "Yes! So true!". The day before, Angelika Langer gave a talk on Lambdas in Java 8. I watched as the other developers listened with half-opened mouths (and some of them, with confused expressions on their faces) and wondered why, instead of bolting features other languages have had for decades onto Java (potentially leading to another fiasco like generics), Oracle doesn't instead continue to work on the JVM to give an even better support for languages that already do have these concepts (by, for example, providing support for TCO).