I have often wondered, why the team around Brian Goetz has been heading towards a “decent compromise” so strongly from the beginning, both from a marketing AND technical point of view, instead of adding more boldness to how Java 8 is advertised. At Devoxx Belgium 2013, Brian Goetz seems to have really sold his accomplishments completely under value, according to this interesting article. Having extensively followed the lambda-dev mailing list, I can only stress how little the creators of Java 8 loved their new defender methods feature, for instance.
Java 8 is what we have all been waiting for, for so long! After all, the introduction of lambda expressions and defender methods (equally impactful, if not as often advertised!) is one of the most significant improvements to the Java language since the very beginnings.
Given the tremendous success of LINQ in .NET, I have recently contemplated whether Java 8, lambda expressions and the Streams API might actually be an equally interesting approach to adding features to an ecosystem, compared to the “scariness” of comprehensions and monads as understood by LINQ: https://blog.jooq.org/does-java-8-still-need-linq-or-is-it-better-than-linq/
While my article above certainly wasn’t well received with the .NET community (and even Erik Meijer himself smirked at it), it did get quite a bit of love from the Java community. In other words, the Java community is ready for Java 8 goodness. Let’s hope Oracle will start advertising it as the cool new thing that it is.