Language changes are super important when they enable you to program in a new way, or in that way with significantly less boilerplate. For instance, Java 8 enabled new ways of programming via Lambdas and structural typing. You could code in that way before, but anonymous class boilerplate was so high that few bothered, and those that did were hard-pressed to convince their colleagues of its value.

The problem with language changes is that to make use of them, your developer community has to educate themselves on the new features and how to use them. Certain VM changes like new GC algorithms often don't require this, as the basic interface of the GC is the same (clean up garbage for me, thanks!).

I think the next big programming style Java may enable is what I call data-oriented programming, which is enabled via sealed types and pattern matching. This enables you to code the dual of OO, where you have a fixed number of sub-types but an unbounded number of operations. I believe this style of programming is useful far more often than it is used, simply because Java doesn't make it easy to code in this style.

Other future changes I am excited for, but don't expect to get implemented any time soon, if ever, frankly, are:

* Improved native code interop. I consider this to be both a language and VM change. * Improved memory layout control, including stack-allocated types and inlined objects inside of other objects. * project loom for golang-style I/O programming. * full tail recursion. Why was this feature rejected from the VM?