More than 2800 developers speak out about Java 8

I primarily use &quot;Java&quot; on Android. I&#x27;m very excited to see the language progressing. Recently, I read Gosling gave Oracle a B+ on stewardship of the language:<p><a href="http://www.javaworld.com/article/2087444/open-source-tools/james-gosling-grades-oracles-handling-of-suns-technology.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.javaworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2087444&#x2F;open-source-tools&#x2F;j...</a><p>However, I&#x27;m getting pretty nervous with the lack of conformance Android Java has to the real Java stack. The two are diverging, and I don&#x27;t see how Google can remedy this.<p>My guess is that Java 6 &amp; 7 were modest enough that many developers of open source libraries thought it easy to support a profile that worked on Android.<p>If Java 8 adoption is as brisk as this poll suggests, with all the features many have been waiting for, I&#x27;m worried a lot of the libraries I use may become incompatible with Android.<p>Already, its hit and miss if a open source java library works on android. I just tried lmax disruptor and it didn&#x27;t work. Things that depend on NIO.2 won&#x27;t work either.

Can someone please moderate the title? The actual blog article title is &quot;Java 8 Survey Results&quot;. The given HN title of &quot;More than 2800 developers speak out about Java 8&quot; is misleading, if not an outright lie.

They say &quot;That being said, the sample, while not scientifically random, is double what’s considered statistically relevant for the total population of Java developers worldwide.&quot;<p>Great. So to forecast the next presidential election they&#x27;re going to poll a million NRA members and celebrate the fact that the sample size is much greater than what&#x27;s needed.

Direct link:<p><a href="http://info.typesafe.com/acton/attachment/3608/f-004a/0/-/-/-/-/file.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;info.typesafe.com&#x2F;acton&#x2F;attachment&#x2F;3608&#x2F;f-004a&#x2F;0&#x2F;-&#x2F;-&#x2F;...</a>

Is it just me, or does this survey say basically nothing at all? Here&#x27;s a summary if you don&#x27;t want to bother reading the PDF (and you probably shouldn&#x27;t bother):<p><pre><code> - Most use Java7, a few still use Java6 - Mixed response on when exactly people will upgrade to j8 - Most exciting feature in j8 is lambdas - 98% use Oracle JVM, 20% use dalvik (android) - App servers popularity is Tomcat, Jetty, Jboss, others - Mixed thoughts on Oracle getting security right </code></pre> Seriously, what is the point of these questions...? You could get all these answers with a google search.

This reads a bit weirdly to me.<p>&gt; Immediate Java 8 Migration Plans: 65% of Java developers have plans to upgrade to Java 8 within the next 24 months.<p>Er; &quot;within the next 2 years&quot; = &quot;immediate&quot;? That&#x27;s a long-enough time scale that a lot of the respondents may be thinking &quot;well, all our enterprise stuff is still on version 6, but surely my plans to overhaul everything won&#x27;t take more than two <i>years</i>, will they?&quot;<p>Also, 2800 is not actually a very high number, is it? Is that enough to be representative of Java developer intentions, preferences, etc.?

The survey went out to largely a Scala audience (anyone signed up for the Typesafe newsletter). As a developer using mostly Scala with some legacy Java code to maintain I see various benefits to Java 8:<p>1) More enhancements to the core java libs that are more functional programming friendly for use from Scala.<p>2) Legacy Java code less painful to maintain.<p>3) Java programmers suddenly stopped calling $FEATURE evil, since Java now provides $FEATURE too (well for a small subset of Scala features anyway).

The new Date &amp; Time API deserves more attention. Working with and persisting dates has always been one of the bigger pain points when working with the JDK. Just last week we encountered some strange bug in Grails where it won&#x27;t persist null values if using custom UserTypes under certain conditions (which we need to persist Joda date types).

I would like to have my hands on the actual data so I can divide results by years of experience etc. This is too generic and doesn&#x27;t server truly a purpose other than create some hype about Java 8.<p>Now, what I would LOVE it would be a survey and thorough interview of the public before Java 9 is built instead of after...

As long as java doesn&#x27;t support aliasing (ie: import com.tool.foo.Bar as FooBar) , its gonna be <i>very</i> hard to tackle the extreme verbosity java results in.

Java 8 is very interesting to me, and although Lambdas get the most publicity, I feel the concurrency updates and streams are the most important new features.

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