[Lewisham]

For all the crap Java the language gets, it's led to many mature, excellent projects and libraries (just take a look down the Apache list), it's led to the JVM and Scala, Clojure, etc.

The language itself has shown that it probably isn't going to get past version 7, and even getting that through was by cutting a whole lot of features (lol closures lol?). However, that would just mean Java faded into insignificance when a new leader emerged. I think this may well have fallen to Scala given time. Oracle is unnecessarily hastening Java's demise, and from my limited understanding of the reporting, might be taking the JVM with it. That's a really bad thing for software development in general.