Comment by pron

I am not dismissing you just pointing out that while your preferences are reasonable, legitimate, and are shared by many, they are also far from universal. I'm a developer, not a diplomat or a marketing person, and if different people ask for opposite things, I don't know how I can say yes to both.

I think that being honest about our strategy that dates back to Java's inception -- an innovative runtime and a conservative, slow-changing language -- that has worked well for us and so we're sticking to is more respectful than giving you some non-committal marketing response. I think you should also be respectful and understand that the Java language team is one of the most successful and experienced language design teams in the world and know what they're doing, even when people might disagree with some decisions. Even experts disagree, and people have different tastes (I find C# and contemporary Kotlin positively garish, while I think Clojure and Zig are elegant and beautiful).

And the language features Java does intend to adopt will come quickly, just as the smallish-medium ones over the last few years have. I believe lambdas were the only language feature that took more than a couple of years to deliver. Once the language team decide they want a feature, they deliver quite quickly. The features that take a long time are usually changes to the runtime (what I mostly work on), not just the language.