After several years of programming Java while always keeping an eye on alternatives around, I’ve recently come to the conclusion:

Actually, there are just a few things still missing in the language these days which would render me a happy camper™ indeed (enjoying its mature ecosystem of libraries & tools).

Especially, since Lombok takes a lot of the general boilerplate code PITA away here (with useful features like convenient property accessors, hashCode/equals/toString impl., logging facility injection, …).

Also, Guava does a truly good job in enabling one to write more concise and robust code.

Plus, Java 7 brought at least some nice, welcome improvements in
→ try-with-resources, exceptions multicatch, etc.

Finally, modern DI with Spring 4 (or Guice) using javax.inject.* and Java config frees one from most needs for XML and, after all, a build sys beating Maven for real has yet to come.

So namely, here’s a personal wish list FTW:

• Pretty much everything coming up with Java/JDK 8 (sooner than later, hopefully) – particularly lambdas (at last…)
• More type inference (which the JVM is totally capable of); Java 7’s diamond operator’s definitely a good start there but, please, let me write val foos = ... (like in Scala…)
• Collection literals à la Python or C#, something like this would be really sweet:

1
2

     val foo = #{"bar": "baz"};
     foo["bar"] = "qux";

Pretty please. :)

PS: literal multiline strings, and so on and so forth, could be nice (but I can live without).
PPS: wouldn’t say no to optionally named function/constructor args, though.

Update 2016: these days, Kotlin’s the way to go, IMHO. :)