It's very difficult for a language designer to satisify the aesthetes.

starting with JDK 16, Stream has .toList() that will save you ten characters for the .collect()

Nobody complains about the Rust turbo-fish operator which is pretty verbose too. Java has already has introduced a direct toList()/toArray() anyways.

    let v = (1..5).collect::<Vec<i32>>(); // Cool Rust

Streams should be built in collections, not a .stream().map(…).toList() convolution. In know its incompatible with weird frameworks who already overloaded the .map() method, but well… let them recompile.

That was in 2008, we’d be happy by now; and Java had no qualms asking everyone to change the package names from javax’ to jakartax’ in Java 21, so they should have issued a java.collections package and deprecated the lists i java.utils.

If v’s type can be inferred, you don’t need to give that extra hint to the type checker, likewise for 1..5. And Java Streams’ toList produces an immutable list.

One benefit is that it makes these operations lazy. There are no intermediate lists created when you call a map on a stream. If map were a method in a list, it would need to return a new list. And if you have multiple such maps etc, it would create more such lists for each map invocation.