Jonas Bonér has some interesting thoughts on Java and language innovation over the last decade. I know that many people I speak to have mentioned that the last decade of OOPSLA has been a do-over - same old ideas, recast in Java. Anyway, it's a mostly thoughtful piece, with some honest questions. The one glaring flaw is the idea that AspectJ represents innovation. It's a compile time hack attempting to mimic Lisp MOP. Which goes to my comment: nearly all the useful ideas to date have come through Lisp and Smalltalk - and everything else has been poorly implemented (and in too many cases, poorly thought out) "improvements" to them.