The last versions of Java that I used extensively were 1.5 and 1.6. I have to “admit”: Those versions were great (as a language, mostly). Well-structured, clear, unambiguous, good multithreading, no memory management madness. After that, all the type inference features ruined it for me (that also ruins Go and Rust). I want to read the types with my own eyes, without having to rely on a magical IDE to tell me! 😢 (Yes, scripting languages like Python are the worst in that regard.)