There's no way to reduce something like: runOnUiThread(new Runnable() { @Optional public void run() { // ... } });

There's no way to reduce something like: runOnUiThread(new Runnable() { @Optional public void run() { // ... } }); It's just the nature of the language. I honestly don't mind recent versions of Java all that much but without an IDE I would lose my mind in about 3 seconds. And once you start writing something significant or that needs to work cross platform say hello to design patterns to work around the straight jacket. I'll take Lisp, JavaScript, Ruby, or Python any day of the week. All languages have warts but to me it seems that Java has warts by design.