The first step to improvement is acknowledging your shortcomings. It's very easy to just accept things as they are and consider them set in stone, when your ent

The first step to improvement is acknowledging your shortcomings. It's very easy to just accept things as they are and consider them set in stone, when your entire community adopts the mindset it leads to stagnation and cargo cult programming. Good ideas should be adopted no matter where they originated. Fortunately not everyone in the Java community is happy with the way things are. Indeed, Java 8 fixes some of the issues mentioned here, like repeating an annotation. Obviously this wasn't some brilliant insight developed in a vacuum, people looked at C# and thought "Neat, I want that!", and now Java is a better language because of it. As engineers we should not settle for the way things are. One day we'll hopefully have Reified Generics, maybe properties and other obviously good ideas, and no thanks to the people who are happy with Java as it is now. "People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it" comes to mind.