"Java is not an innovative language" does not mean "Java was never an innovative language". I get the feeling Java seems to have suffered from its early succes

"Java is not an innovative language" does not mean "Java was never an innovative language". I get the feeling Java seems to have suffered from its early success, pioneering things like generics in GC languages, which competitors like C# were able to do better, but only because Microsoft decided to break compatibility between .NET 1 and .NET 2 or because there was no compatibility to break. After that, the language seems to have shyed away from innovation out of fear of breaking things for a long time. In recent years, this has changed, but Java has a lot of language features to catch up on. Project Loom (green threading without coloured functions) is the first innovative thing I've seen Java do in recent history.