This is not the only effort to "replace" Java. There is also Ceylon.
http://planet.jboss.org/post/introduction_to_ceylon_part_1Me personally I don't understand what people have to moan about Java. It saved me incredible amounts of development time 8 years ago, it still does today. Switching to a language with more syntactic bells and whistles is not going to change any of that because development time is still determined by the complexity of the programming problem at hand, not by which tool you use to solve it. Who cares if I you can save a few keystrokes, most time lost is spent thinking, not typing :/