[nileshk]

At work, we have some customers who want to use WebLogic and Websphere, and last time I checked those don't have versions that support anything beyond Java 8.

I still use Java 8 even on personal projects. I'm migrating those to Kotlin, so I'm at least not held back with regard to programming language features. I could upgrade those to Java 11 (or 12), just haven't prioritized taking the time to do that over other tasks, and the benefit would be minimal for these particular projects.

When using Java 8 language, I'm just happy to have lambdas and streams. Java 8 was the biggest improvement to Java language since 5 -- and I'd say it's a bigger leap that 5 was.

[klodolph]

I don't use Java at work, but at home I inevitably install it for some kind of tooling. Always Java 8. I've accidentally installed Java 9 or newer a couple times and always ended up with something broken.

[sanxiyn]

I disagree. Addition of generics in Java 5 was bigger.

[barrkel]

I'd rather keep lambdas and live with runtime polymorphism, than keep parametric polymorphism and lose lambdas.

Generics, in terms of scope, is a bigger feature, for sure. And generics make lambdas more usable. But the distance between generics and their alternative - manual casts throughout - is larger than the distance between lambdas and anonymous inner classes.

[usrusr]

Lambdas on untyped streams? I think I'll pass...

Speaking of dark matter coding, story time: a spare time project of mine involves bringing an actual, pre-generics codebase into the not quite as distant past. That beast still has real, living users! Surprisingly, a frequent complaint is running out of heap memory, so they are happily sharing their magic -Xmx incantations with values that would have been outrageously high when the code was written.