I somewhat agree with you in that Java should have made bolder moves earlier on to provide some of these features and not lash itself to a bunch of backwards-compatibility cruft.
And maybe a bunch of language changes right now will muddy the water a bit - but as far as I can tell, most of the new language features in Java 7 will cut down considerably on boilerplate and unnecessary verbosity, which should go a long way toward making code more understandable, which will be a breath of fresh air.
If a little bit of altered syntax like what's being proposed is enough to make anyone's head explode, maybe they should reevaluate whether software development is really for them. And if your enterprise's codebase and culture isn't ready for language changes, nobody is going to force you to switch to Java 7.
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I somewhat agree with you in that Java should have made bolder moves earlier on to provide some of these features and not lash itself to a bunch of backwards-compatibility cruft.
And maybe a bunch of language changes right now will muddy the water a bit - but as far as I can tell, most of the new language features in Java 7 will cut down considerably on boilerplate and unnecessary verbosity, which should go a long way toward making code more understandable, which will be a breath of fresh air.
If a little bit of altered syntax like what's being proposed is enough to make anyone's head explode, maybe they should reevaluate whether software development is really for them. And if your enterprise's codebase and culture isn't ready for language changes, nobody is going to force you to switch to Java 7.