You're right about your main points: for some years before Sun's demise Java was neglected and lacked resources, and Oracle has gradually but significantly incr

You're right about your main points: for some years before Sun's demise Java was neglected and lacked resources, and Oracle has gradually but significantly increased its investment in the platform. It is also true that the abnormality of ~2000-2005, when there were few popular languages, has ended. But the following two facts are also true: Scala didn't invent those features, and neither Kotlin nor Scala are big enough to be serious competitors for Java. So Java might be feeling the heat of competition, but not from those two, and, like all other languages, it looks around and borrows features, but not from those two more than others. It is possible that Java platform languages might indicate the palatability of certain features to Java programmers more than non-Java platform languages, and the Java language designers do have a closer relationship with the designers of other Java platform languages. But overall, these effects are not particularly big. Knowing the current designers of the language, I can say with certainty that Haskell has served as a bigger inspiration than either Kotlin or Scala on recent features and their design (inspiration, not direct source).