A language should have been an asynchronous library? How does that even make sense?
And as for backward compatibility, they already did. I love the myth that java never broke backwards compatibility. Bytecode maybe (), they definitely broke syntax compatiblity.
: The various xml parsers and other library thrash really do break backwards bytecode compatiblity.
Proof?
Here's a couple of recent examples the Guava authors have fixed. Fortunately they were in internals and not their public API, so users won't care.
https://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/source/detail?r=7d... https://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/source/detail?r=25...
What is meant by "breaking backward compatibility" is when the grammar is altered in a way that makes existing sources no longer compile.
In case it's the former, "a lot nicer" is subjective, so it carries no weight in the discussion.
If the latter... well, go read a few books on compiler design and language theory.
You do know D the language was written by compiler expert, right - if you had a point or just insult.
Java has a reputation of a bad community, and you just underline it here.