alt Hacker NewsI find it weird that the people steering Java have been seemingly willing to sit out the use case high performance computation while it has so dominated the computing landscape. They are just patiently incrementally iterating on all these JEP's that would support dramatically improved capabilities and make Java a very attractive platform for ML - but they keep fretting over minor interface adjustments, cycle after cycle. I get there is a philosophy of keeping the language stable and well designed, but this is really taking it to an extreme in the face of missing an entire segment of computing.
It's a long roadmap, but this is their ultimate objective. Once java has value classes, future carrier classes and member patterns, that's when we shall see some very huge interest for java in ML. Also, they plan to introduce typeclasses in which it will be convenient to introduce operator overloading, and collection/array literals etc syntax. The idea is to unify the types in java, and then enable much stronger semantics to ensure data oriented programming becomes ergonomic in java.