I assume OP prefers Kotlin or Scala.

Personally, I think one of my favorite things about Java is that, all things considered, it's a small-ish language. So I'm glad that Java is both willing to evolve (slowly, letting other people try stuff out first) but also clearly focused on a curated feature set and resistant to letting new stuff in to bloat it. I am very happy to deal with minor things like no multiline string support if it means we get to avoid being a terrible mess of language features that ruby, scala, python, etc have accrued in a relatively quicker timescale.

I was fairly sad around the java 6-7 days where we went quite a long time with no visibly major new language features (diamond inference was 7's big thing, lol). So it is nice that we're moving a bit faster than that, now.

By multiline strings are you referring to text blocks? Those have been added to the language in Java 15: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/15/text-blocks/index.... .

Oh, sorry, I know, I mentioned it specifically because it was "only" just added in Java 15 (which is basically "now" in Java timescales heh, and has only literally just now (with 17) made it into LTS AdoptOpenJDK releases, which also haven't quite landed on many distros package repositories, etc etc.). So for some weird value of "right now" Java still doesn't quite have multi line strings due to its newness.

Tbh I still crave Kotlins inline string interpolation.

A “superior” implementation is in the works with templated strings.

It will look something like this:

STR.”text with \\{variable}”, but anything implementing the TemplatedString interface can change the behavior of interpolation. There is not even a requirement to produce strings only!

Oh nice, do you have a link to the project?

Cheers!

> I don’t follow why this is unfortunate?

I'm guessing Java hate, which is kind of fashionable. If Java evolves to stay relevant, it won't be usurped and fade away.

What I don't want to see happen is innovation stop in JVM languages and then Java, no longer under threat, also stops innovating.

Java has basically no threat from Kotlin and the like. The reason it innovates now is simply Oracle’s increased pouring of money into the platform, which is especially visible now compared to the stagnation of the end of the Sun era.

A lot of people have migrated away from Java to better JVM languages. If Java actually keeps improving, there's a reasonable likelihood that people will stop migrating and those that have may come back to Java from these other langs.

Long term this could lead to a loss of maintenance for tools and libraries for these languages which could kill them and leave those that migrated with a dead & decaying ecosystem.

Of course this is a bit of a stretch but it's not unheard of.

Over the last short while I've seen Lightbend announce ceasing support for Play, others express that Slick is likely abandonware, and also seen my chosen Play authentication library, silhouette, get archived on github. All of this has impacted my favorite side project that I've been slowly plugging away on.

Silhouette is probably just because of one guy's schedule, but Play/Slick seems like after-effects of lightbend's layoffs many months ago, and while I don't know the cause of those it seems plausible it's because of the kind of thing you describe above.

A tiny drop, an endless collection of guest language that goes back to Beanshell, many of which now forgotten.

If people left Java for other language(s), wouldn't that leave Java with a decaying ecosystem?

Maybe worry about leveling the playing field first? There's so much money and research and development going into Java that there's no possible way for Java to end up with a "decaying ecosystem" inside the next twenty years. It's like pointing out DuckDuckGo and worrying about Google.

Most of them stayed somewhere on the jvm though. Still in the ecosystem.