> things so long desired and so long available in other languages That's a feature, not a bug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31380032 https://news.ycomb

> things so long desired and so long available in other languages That's a feature, not a bug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31380032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31380032 When you say, "so long desired," the question is, by whom? Java (the language) isn't aimed at PL enthusiasts, but the majority of programmers, and believe it or not, most programmers are quite averse to new language features, so great care is needed in adopting them if a lanugage wants to be very popular, as Java aims to be. I can tell you that even when there's a feature we strongly believe is "right", we are wary of adding it to Java until it has been "so long available in other languages." An example I personally worked on — and it's not even a language feature, but a simple API in a single class — is structured concurrency. We love the concept, but because it hasn't yet been "so long available in other languages", we've only proposed it as an "incubator module" to let it mature, and even then we're only adding it because we believe it is too essential to be left out. It appears that you can be extremely popular or you can be an adventurous innovator/early adopter on the language-feature front, but you can't be both. The Java platform offers multiple language for those who like more adventurous and/or feature-rich languages — and we're happy to accommodate such languages — but they are definitely in the minority (my rough estimate is that only about 10% of programmers prefer such languages).