An article from Elliotte Rusty Harold called ONJava.com: 10 Reasons We Need Java 3.0. I tend to agree with most of the posters in this Slashdot discussion about the article, I think it's a rather shallow list. He picks on a number of motes while ignoring the planks. The ones from his list I'd like to see are

• Eliminate primitive data types (Elliotte's 8), or perhaps add automatic wrapping and unwrapping.
• Extend chars to four bytes (Elliotte's 7) looks like a good plan based on the information he provides.
• Redesign class loading (Elliotte's 1). I don't find the system as confusing as he seems to but I think it would be nice to incorporate versioning in the same way that the .Net CLR does.

Plus two extra.

• Add generics. I hope this is probably the one that most professional Java programmers would most like to have.
• Tail call elimination.

I'm not sure these need Java 3.0 that isn't backwards compatible though. I'd hope it would be possible to make these changes within the current language. The existing code base is a great asset of Java and shouldn't be thrown away. That would just take us back to where .Net is now.