[dkarl]

I feel these new language features that get grafted onto Java end up awkward and unpleasant to use. Java is still Java, and it exacts a stiff awkwardness tax for writing code in a style different from how Java OO was envisioned 15-20 years ago. The examples in the linked article look fine, but the difference between pattern matching as "possible direction" and pattern matching as "new language feature" could easily end up like the difference between Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane and Orson Welles as Falstaff.

I wonder if Oracle could create some excitement around the platform by creating or adopting a new language as an official repla^D^D^D^D^D "new member of the family" to implicitly succeed Java just like C# replaced Visual Basic for most use cases. Java could be kept around as a sop to die-hards like VB.NET was. It's great that the JVM allows a thousand flowers to bloom, but it's not great that the only "official" choice on the JVM is a language that hasn't been able to evolve very far from its 1990s roots.

[jeremyjh]

Oracle's most profitable customers are still using Java 6. That wouldn't change if they were pushing Kotlin.

[dkarl]

I don't know Kotlin, but judging by their "Kotlin for Scala Developers" article I don't know if it would be a big enough jump to get people excited, especially since a project like this would take years to come to fruition. I think Scala is a good first try at what the successor language could be, but it has two problems: its reputation as a hard language, and the fact that it partly deserves said reputation. (Maybe if Odersky succeeds in simplifying the concepts underlying Scala as he's trying to now with Dotty, the result will be a potential Java-killer.) Oracle would have to fund a research project to choose an existing candidate and spend years developing it to fit the role it would play in the market. Which sounds very unlike Oracle, so I'm not holding my breath.

EDIT: And to your point, I think it's a bad sign if their most profitable customers think that none of the Java language updates they've released in the last ten years is worth upgrading for. The longer their customers stick with 2006-era Java, the longer they pass up Oracle's current offerings, the less attached they feel to the future of the platform, and the more likely they are to make a big change when they do make a change.