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I do not speak for the GP comment.

JDK has a pretty clear social contract to not break the world. Of course, they can reneg; but if you gratuitously break stuff like hosted JVM languages and the de-facto package manager, people are going to reconsider your platform.

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This is correct and possibly seems crazy from some other language communities :-), but Java is fairly venerable (20 yrs) and is a backbone platform for many risk averse entities and this strong social contract has I believe added to its longevity and relevance.

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