With professional Java8 and Scala experience, and as a published author of a book that uses both languages side by side, I strongly disagree.<p>Look at how Java8 implements lambdas via a Single Abstract Method (SAM) - it&#x27;s syntactic sugar. Or look at the streams api and collections library - Java8 IS the hack on top of Java. Scala is built from the ground up to be a better language.<p>Java8 is not at all comparable with Scala. There is a giant gap in the quality of the core libraries and the quality of the language and implementations of functional features. Part of the problem is the history of the language. Bless java for the jvm but saying that scala is extrenous and that java should be improved to have those features ignores the evidence that it can&#x27;t be done well ontop of what is already there.