While reading Bruce Eckel's article, Java: Evolutionary Dead End, he mentioned of another programming language which is somehow based on Java(and runs on the same VM) but has the feel and construct of a Scripting language(e.g. Ruby). I got interested and quickly searched for any related article and I found the following:
While it's still arguable if new things should continously be added to the Java language, I partially agree with Bruce Eckel. I think that the Java language should stop evolving in adding new features/keywords except for new API's. New language constructs should be left to a new programming language, and in Bruce Eckel's opinion, Scala. This is a better idea IMHO because we've already seen this done in other technologies like for example:
* C/C++ - Lua Scripting Languag(For game development)
* HTML - Javascript(thus DHTML)
* SQL - Procedeural Language
One reason I liked Java before was that it hardly ever changed during the past years(until Java 5). The same goes for C/C++(atleast for the last 7 years). Generics is a good addition to the Java language but other than that, I already feel like I have everything I need to do my job. I'm actually quite happy when JSP 2.0 introduced the "Expression Language". Rather than trying to make JSP solve the problem on its own, they introduced another language which is in the form ${myObject.member}.
Finally, since I'm no language expert. I am merely a user. Still I think bloating the language with unecessary features really makes me sick.