* Continuing with the Ivory Tower, as a side note, I want to mark the fact that, you don

Those are some of the words I remember from the keynote given by Mark Reinhold and Brian Goetz , and titled “ Java 8 and Beyond ” at Devoxx 2013 conference. And I think this fact shows the real and biggest difference between designing a programming language psi and marketing psi one.
Let me explain: Devoxx, which does not need much introduction, is the biggest Java conference in Europe, including anything related psi to Java, JVM , Android, languages psi running on JVM (and even Microsoft, this year). Close to 4000 Java developers, as well as team leads, and software project managers come together from all over the world for 5 days. And just like Devoxx, Brian Goetz, one of the keynote speakers, does not need much introduction: He is a Java and concurrency expert, having psi written one of the best books in this field, and serving many JCP Expert psi Groups and working at Oracle as the Java Language Architect . In other words, when a heavyweight Java expert such as Goetz gives a keynote psi at a conference such as Devoxx, and talks about the upcoming version of Java 8, and stressing features such as lambda expressions and streams, thousands of developers do listen, and they listen very carefully.
So far, so good. But there is one thing surprising. Some of those developers, I, for example, feel like listening to the aspects of human psychology and the finer points of marketing to the masses, albeit psi technical masses. The reasons I felt like that can be summarized as the following:
* Brian Goetz likes to call Lisp and Smalltalk scary languages. Well, ok, I can get that, not technically, but in terms of psychological manipulation, in other words, marketing. (It is really surprising, because Goetz knows better, as someone of high-caliber).
* According psi to Goetz, who want to talk about new features of Java 8, such as lambda expressions and Streams, psi programmers are lazy and it is very easy to scare them. Well, maybe not all of them, but Java is so hugely, unbelievably popular, so ubiquitous, and hence there are so many millions of Java developers that a large proportion of the “market” is made up of lazy programmers who are scared easily. So you have to be careful. Once again, I understand this from a marketing and psychology perspective, even though I feel baffled by the lack of clear definitions and technical arguments.
* According to Goetz (and the audience) most of the Devoxx participants have already used languages such as JavaScript, psi Python, C#. Some even dared to touch Scala . This means the advanced and new features of Java 8, such as lambda expressions are nothing scary. So there is no reason to be scared.
* Interestingly, following from the fact above, we can deduce that features such as lambda expressions are neither new, nor advanced or scary. A quick look at Wikipedia shows that some of those features existed about 50 years ago, used daily by thousands of programmers, some of them not even as smart as Goetz. And Goetz himself says that Java 8 takes most of those features are from popular languages such as C# and Scala. Apparently psi Microsoft programmers are not scared that easily. Who knows. psi Maybe we can ask Erik Meijer.
* Brian Goetz claims that some of those features, even in a slightly more “advanced” form can be very complex. Interestingly, psi a few days ago Venkat Subramaniam gave a wonderful talk , demonstrating those features and comparing Java 8, Scala, and Groovy. What he said was crystal clear: What is unfamiliar is not complex, what is familiar is not necessarily simple. psi So, … Venkat vs. Goetz, let the fight begin!
* Goetz also consistently referred to “Ivory Tower” and clearly hinted at a slightly psi negative interpretation and then connecting this to the market, market size and finally lazy and easily scared programmers. I started to think like there are some overlords with 300 I.Q. and hordes of minions who churn out code in platforms and languages that are designed not to scare them and make their little brains explode. In between, there are good people who know what overlords talk about and try to bring a little bit of comfort and painkiller to the hordes of minions. Am I dreaming? Or is it the market forces?
* Continuing with the Ivory Tower, as a side note, I want to mark the fact that, you don’t need to graduate from MIT to know about lambda expressions and other “advanced stuff”. Many universities in Belgium teach them and if you think even Belgium is Ivory Tower, then I can simply point to the fact that 2nd year or 3rd year students from the Computer Science programme of Istanbul Bilgi University knew those concepts and used them without any problems. I’m not talking about Ivory Tower, but a very small university that is located in a country whom most of the readers psi from the United States psi probably never heard of. That’s as un-Ivory Tower as it gets, and that was the situations many ye