I wonder if with Java 8 and the ability to do lambdas and more complex functional programming techniques will hurt Java in the long run. I do Java as my day job, and have only recently finally been able to do Java 8 at work in the past few months. I am a big proponent of functional programming practices, and we do a lot of Javascript front end.
Pre-Java 8 I was always concerned that the language would decay since it is syntatically decades old, and become the COBOL for the new millenium. I know I can jump into whatever the flavor of the month is, but I have always been happy doing this. Of course, flavor of them month became flavor of the year, then flavor of the decade... and now I have been doing Java for over 15 years. It sill might become the next COBOL, but it is flexible enough that you can do pretty much any business programming you ever need, while being interesting enough to bring in new programmers out of school.
But my work has a small number of highly experienced developers. If I was still working at a big soulless corporation with dozens of bottom tier developers mixed in with the seasoned pros, I wonder if this would result in the code being unreadable? I have seen some terrible code in java 4 and 5, I can only imagine the horrors an idiot could wreak with lambdas. Granted, I am sure most of them are still doing java 6 compatible code, since only small companies can afford to change momentum and upgrade.