[cgh]

The major issues for a lot of people are simply cosmetic clutter: having to specify types everywhere rather than some basic type inference, for example.

Other problems are deeper: no first-class functions, no tail-call recursion support in the JVM (Clojure has a hack to deal with this), no map/fold/etc. equivalents that can potentially aid with parallelization. I think 1.8 addresses some of these.

Personally, I can live without the modern language niceties. I would really, really like type inference though. Oh, and unsigned ints too.

[PaulHoule]

I agree about the unsigned ints.

Java does have its own form of type inference that revolves around Generic functions and once you make peace with it, life isn't so bad. Rather than writing

var xyzzy=new ArrayList<Foo>();

you can write

List<Foo> xyzzy=Lists.newArrayList();

Similarly, the lack of first class functions can be worked around by various means. The Guava toolkit contains map/fold and other functional operations, and when worse comes to worse you can write

for(Thing that:things) fn(that);

In cases where you might be tempted to do something that's more verbose than if you tried to do it the cool way.

There is a lot to like about JDK8 but unfortunately I'm coding to JDK6 these days instead of JDK7 because it's a waste of time dealing with trouble tickets caused by people who are running the wrong Java version and don't know what is going on.