Comment by pron

> When Java ends up adopting those features, suddenly it's "we accommodate a non-minority number of developers" and "we've been thinking about this since before Java was released".

It's not those features, though! Obviously, a hoarder has everything, so anything you buy is something he has. We are adopting a small portion of the features that feature-rich languages have, which is exactly the difference between a more feature-rich language and a more minimal one.

> ...aaand there it is again. "The lesser languages".

Again? I haven't said "the lesser language" once, although you've now said it a few times as if quoting me. You're arguing with things I haven't said and then misquote me to completely change the meaning of what I actually wrote.

No one, on the Java team or outside it, considers Lisp, Smalltalk, and ML - the languages that inspired Java - "lesser" languages. They are, however, all less successful languages as a matter of fact. It is because they are not lesser but they are less successful that we selectively adopt a portion of their ideas but do not adopt their strategy.

It's not about snobbery, but basic business strategy. Suggesting that it's good business for a product to adopt the strategy of some competitor product doesn't make much sense when that other product is doing worse than your own. I mean, maybe it could be interesting if there were some other key element to the plan, but not on its own.

Almost every single feature in Java was inspired by (or sometimes copied from) a feature in a less successful language (although not always less successful at the time the feature was adopted), but Gosling was always very clear about copying good ideas into a product with a very different strategy (he thought it was the strategy that hindered those other products, not their ideas).

> When Java ends up adopting those features, suddenly it's "we accommodate a non-minority number of developers" and "we've been thinking about this since before Java was released".

No, we've also been thinking about features that may well probably never make it. I'm not even sure what you're trying to say, but you should know that anyone who works in language design has been familiar with type inference, generics, typed lambdas, pattern matching, and algebraic data types at least since the late eighties because ML has been the biggest single influence on language designers and other PL fans in the past couple of decades (ML was released in the early seventies, but it didn't become so influential right away).

> I'm glad it seems you're in the minority seeing how Java has picked up its development pace.

Java has picked up its development pace compared to the time we were involuntarily stagnant due to declining investment from our corporate overlords. As always, most of the development is in the runtime, as that has always been our strategy, and we all think it's a good one. I'm very happy that we can do more now than we could fifteen years ago, but the Java language won't become a (relatively) feature-rich language, even though it will continue to add features.