I'm excited by Java 8 moreso than at least several of the previous versions. Java 7 was especially underwhelming.
The lambdas are the new hotness that everyone is aware of. But the work done on streams is almost equally impressive.
There are several other small additions and reductions in pain that, when taken as a whole, make this update significant. For example, we finally will have a native JodaTime-like replacement for Calendar, Date, and the supporting utilities. I've long considered the need to enforce external thread safety on DateFormatters to be one of the silliest design failures in Java.
Disclosure: this summary was written by a colleague of mine.
I am hacking a while now with java 8 and can say that one of the most appreciated features in my stack are lambdas. as soon as you are used to them (had the first introduction to lambda-style programming with Blocks in ObjC) you miss them so badly when they are not there (C for example).
A year or so ago, I wrote what was effectively a small subset of the JDK8 streams stuff. Incredibly useful, but hard to get right. It's good the core APIs will be part of the JDK so that, like the collections API, they may be adopted with some trust that others will do the same.
The lambdas are the new hotness that everyone is aware of. But the work done on streams is almost equally impressive.
There are several other small additions and reductions in pain that, when taken as a whole, make this update significant. For example, we finally will have a native JodaTime-like replacement for Calendar, Date, and the supporting utilities. I've long considered the need to enforce external thread safety on DateFormatters to be one of the silliest design failures in Java.
Disclosure: this summary was written by a colleague of mine.