This is really troubling to me. I'm a Scala developer and JVM nerd by trade (though more devops and high-level architecture as of late) and I've been hoping really hard that they'd just bite the bullet, flag-day the current type erasure and non-unified type system, and make Java 10 what...well, what the CLR is, now, today. The generic specialization route they describe is at best gross, isn't much better than what Scala already does today, and kicks the real problems only slightly further down the road.
Still being crap in 2017, when the alternatives are good to great now, is dangerous, and Oracle's fear of alienating the masses of people who'll forever be two versions of Java behind is leaving the door open for Microsoft. I write games in C# in my free time, and between how great VS/R# is[1] and Microsoft supporting a CLR implementation I am inclined to trust more than Mono's on Linux and OS X, I'm excited at the prospect of being able to use .NET for server applications (no, no Windows Server for me, not now and not never) in the future.
[1] - IntelliJ comes close, but it does suffer, from a usability standpoint, from being cross-platform and having to compromise--I'd rather run a VM on my Mac to use VS than use IntelliJ, all things considered!
Still being crap in 2017, when the alternatives are good to great now, is dangerous, and Oracle's fear of alienating the masses of people who'll forever be two versions of Java behind is leaving the door open for Microsoft. I write games in C# in my free time, and between how great VS/R# is[1] and Microsoft supporting a CLR implementation I am inclined to trust more than Mono's on Linux and OS X, I'm excited at the prospect of being able to use .NET for server applications (no, no Windows Server for me, not now and not never) in the future.
[1] - IntelliJ comes close, but it does suffer, from a usability standpoint, from being cross-platform and having to compromise--I'd rather run a VM on my Mac to use VS than use IntelliJ, all things considered!