Before We Start — Feel the Difference You’re about to learn Java 8. Before diving into history and theory, let’s just feel what changed. Here’s the same task written in Java 7 and Java 8: Task: Find all names that start with “A”, uppercase them, sort them, and collect into a list. // Java 7 — 10 lines, two passes, one temporary variable, zero joy List<String> result = new ArrayList<>(); for (String name : names) { if (name.