&quot;it&quot; is a magic value that was introduced in Groovy, so a lot of people are familiar with it. You got used to &quot;this&quot; being a magic value, &quot;it&quot; is a pretty easy concept to grasp.<p>Besides, it&#x27;s not any more magical than &quot;_&quot; (which has, what... eleven different meanings? [1]) and it&#x27;s super convenient. Still, don&#x27;t like it? Just explicitly name your closure parameter. But you&#x27;ll be surprised how you will quickly stop doing that for trivial closure uses because finding names is such a pain.<p>You&#x27;re right that Java 8 has been closing the gap, though, but note that Java 9 doesn&#x27;t have any new language features that will close that gap further.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;8001065&#x2F;162410" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;8001065&#x2F;162410</a>