JDK 8 Release Notes
You know, I've been messing around with Java little lately. Nothing too fancy. It's actually not a bad language -- with a modern IDE it's actually pretty quick and breezy to work with.<p>If the standard library was cleaned up and the warts were all removed and filled in, even if it broke compatibility (call it Java X or the Latte language or something) I'd be okay with that. There's too much old 90's cruft hanging around making usage of different pieces non-standard and lots of over-objectizing everything so you end up having to assemble lots of things out of little pieces, boilerplate-like, that should just be a single import and instantiation.<p>The modern JVM is surprisingly quick and robust technology and I've been pretty happy with it in my limited tests. I ported some old Perl algorithms to it and got some really good speed out of it once I benchmarked some of the collections a little.<p>Some things should just be outright fixed, like a proper regex literal so I don\\'t have to \\e\\s\\ca\\\p\\\\e everything so much\\\\\//\/\\.<p>It's "got good bones" and a refurb of the entire thing to bring it focus could breath a lot of long-term life into it.<p><i>edit</i><p>I guess what I'm trying to say is it would be great if the language was informed a bit more with what's going on in the dynamic languages space like Go has been. I like how Python is about as clear as Java code is, but it's always seemed a little more quick and breezy to work with. This is something I think Go got right and it'd be great if Java sort of caught onto this.