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My impression of Java, as someone who ends up having to use it every few years when I can't get out of it, is that the cumulative effect of generics and autobox

My impression of Java, as someone who ends up having to use it every few years when I can't get out of it, is that the cumulative effect of generics and autoboxing can really change the feel of the language, but only if you use them, of course. Also, I thought real closures were introduced in 1.7? That seems like a big change to me. Re: C# I was mostly referring to annotations for reflection. If they ever wanted to add first class getter/setter methods that would be cool, too.

thebluesky 14y ago
Closures were not added to JDK 7, they will be added to JDK8 next year. Generics are definitely the biggest change, but not so much autoboxing (something that makes little difference to 99.9% of code). The annotations Java devs use the most are usually @Override and @Test, unless you're using bloatware like Spring/Hibernate/J(2)EE which belongs in 2004. Annotations are useful, but not really groundbreaking for most code. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_annotation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_annotation In terms of first class getter and setter, I'd say take a look at Scala (or Groovy). Lots of Java devs are looking beyond Java the language, mostly because it has been incredibly slow to evolve.