So here's a thing that everyone thought was going to be in Java 7 and now isn't -- the Swing Application Framework (which in January I called a JSR to watch in 2009, whoops). Work on it hasn't progressed, now it's being pushed back to Java 8 maybe, etc. It wasn't really a core bit of the language, though it would have given heart to those worried that Sun was done with Swing.

But there's a larger sense that big fixes and changes aren't being added to the language any more, closures being the big one that seems to have such an intense following. In a smart and provocative blog post, Chas Emerick says that you should learn to love the new, more stable Java language. I won't rehash his arguments in depth here, but he basically says that Java is now a systems language, like C; making big changes to it would be counterproductive, because all the action is taking place in the JVM languages built on top of it. Java actually needs to be stable, because without being able to depend on such stability, folks wouldn't take the time to invest in work on those languages. By becoming necessary, Java ceases to be interesting.