True, some businesses will likely stay on 8 for as long as their application lasts, and this can certainly be a rational decision. But I completely reject the c

True, some businesses will likely stay on 8 for as long as their application lasts, and this can certainly be a rational decision. But I completely reject the comparison to Python. The effort required to update from 8 to 9+ is nowhere near that of Python 2->3. Virtually all code runs unchanged... except for code that hacks into the JDK and depends on implementation details that have changed, which mostly exists in libraries. The snags are usually in libraries that have made some major API change 5 years ago that the application hasn't adapted to, and the old versions don't run on 9+ for some reason. So the obstacles are real, but it's not like the platform could have avoided them. In the future, such problems will hopefully be avoided when hacking into the JDK is blocked (which might happen as soon as JDK 16, due next March). The benefits are also quite different from the Python case. The hardware/hosting savings in recent versions compared to JDK can easily more than offset the cost of migration in a big number of cases if not the majority. If you upgrade to a new JDK you get money, possibly quite a lot. That wasn't the case with Python. So while there could be good reasons to stay on 8 for the lifetime of an application, the cost of upgrade is substantially lower, and the benefit is substantially higher than the case of Python (and by "substantially" I mean something like 10x).