You might also want to check out Kotlin. It's basically what everyone wished Java 8 had been, but wasn't because a) backwards compatibility, and b) difference o

You might also want to check out Kotlin. It's basically what everyone wished Java 8 had been, but wasn't because a) backwards compatibility, and b) difference of opinion (looking at you Optional). We have a set of coding conventions we use for our Java code that includes things like using Optional.empty() instead of null and declaring all method parameters (and as many locals and properties as we can get away with) as final. We've found that using Kotlin allows us to write equivalent code in a far more succinct fashion because all those conventions we follow are the default state in Kotlin, and it's deviating from those conventions that requires extra syntax in Kotlin.