[Explicit]

They make sense in the case of functional interfaces, but besides that I think they just sacrifice readability for less lines of code.

Aside from generics in 1.5, the language really hasn't seen much change for the everyday programmer pre-1.8.

That's because it doesn't need changing.

My entire point in that post is that it does need changing. Something new to the language every so often will be necessary to keep it from being replaced by newer languages with more features and more succinct syntax. If you take a look at the TIOBE index you can clearly see its decline.

Lambdas really aren't a big change tbh, and it's not a change at all when it comes to functionality. The only difference is syntax and afaik (haven't read any info on JVM 1.8 ) it compiles down to almost the same thing.