Re: The long-suffering Java community
To be honest, if the absence such language features are preventing you from doing your job, you should reconsider your role as a developer. Every programming environment has strengths and weaknesses, and understanding and working around those is core to delivering functionality. At the end of the day, that's what people actually want - a functioning system, not one that's written using specific constructs.
I'll accept that it's nice to have some language features, but it's also nice to have an incredibly efficient run time, hot spot optimisation, immensely fast garbage collection, vast swathes of inbuilt libraries that are robust, well characterised and reliably supported from one release to the next. It's also nice to have complete documentation, support across multiple platforms and a host of tools that handle everything from virtualisation to performance and testing. Oh yes, then there's the interoperability with many other systems, support for different languages on the VM, third party frameworks and the availability of experienced developers who can work with all of the above.
As it is, the long suffering Java community have produced Scala, Groovy, Clojure, JRuby and a host of others, and modularisation is well supported by OSGi. The absence of Jigsaw is not going to stop the use of Java in projects large and small. At the same time, Oracle seem to be consistently wrong-footed in this arena which is, more than anything, a missed opportunity.