So apparently Sun has decided to add closures to Java 7. They will, of course, not remove anything to make room, so Java just gets bigger and bulkier. They will also give us a half-hearted implementation that removes some interesting pieces that would make it backwards incompatible, so we're getting really aren't closures after all. Did Sun learn nothing from the generics debacle?
Most tellingly, despite all the talk of openness, this seems to very much be Sun's decision. There's no proposal in the JCP, and all discussion of this seems to have purely been internal to Sun. If you aren't eating lunch in the Sun cafeteria, you don't get to chime in. Sun simply presented the decision as a fait accompli to the community. First they decided they wouldn't do closures in Java 7; then they decided they would; and now they'll decide how and when. Scala's looking more attractive by the hour.