I think the question here is whether or not it will defend against wholesale abandonment of Java to things like Scala and Clojure. To make the complete switch y

I think the question here is whether or not it will defend against wholesale abandonment of Java to things like Scala and Clojure. To make the complete switch you might have to rewrite some code. With the Java improvements you can even keep a lot of your old code designed to work with inner classes and just use that code more effectively with the new closure and method handle syntax and implementation. There are many shops that probably haven't fully adopted generics from Java 5 in their own code but they benefit from the libraries that have moved to them.