[tebeka]

People forget that doing backward breaking changes take a while. Python 3 was released at the end of 2008, 2 years after Java 6. How many systems you know still run on Java 5?

[postfuturist]

Java 6 did not break backward compatibility (code written for Java 5 generally runs fine on Java 6).

[alphabetam]

Code written for Java 2 runs fine on Java 8, with extremely limited exceptions. Java, just as Windows, is used too much in enteprise apps to lose backward compatibility.

[tetha]

Yup. Biggest roadblocks in java update are bytecode manipulation libraries and at the moment maven.

I'm still intrigued by this situation: I'm running my software on java 8, but I can't compile it as java 8 unless I do that by hand (... really?)