How to describe the pro- and anti- language change camps?

I think you are doing a disservice to the cause of no language changes by labeling us as "conservative" in general and defining language changes as "innovation".

I wasn't sure if the term "conservative" would be too politically loaded to use to describe those who are generally against the proposed Java 7 language changes, but this comment on yesterday's editor's blog makes me think that the political baggage got dragged in where it wasn't wanted. Another said "I do not consider myself as being conservative. Not politically and not in daily life," while jwenting clarified "We aren't so much conservative as in "resisting change" [...] but conservative as in "cautious"."

My dictionary's definition of "conservative" (this is from the Oxford American Dictionary that comes with the US version of Mac OS X, for what it's worth) didn't help matters by offering what is arguably a biased definition, saying that to be conservative is "cautious about change or innovation". Political conservatives probably don't consider the ideas they oppose to be "innovative" any more than this vocal part of the Java community feels that pining for closures ("just because Ruby has them", they say) is innovative.

In fact, my sense of the term goes way back to high school, when I did a presentation on the Greek comic poet Aristophanes. One of the sources I read made the claim that topical comedy is inherently conservative, in that it mocks the new, thereby implying the old ways were better. With this way of thinking, regardless of whether Arisophanes' favorite target, the Athenian Strategos Cleon, was "conservative" or "liberal" by any modern reckoning (if such reckoning even makes sense), there's a certain "conservative" sensibility in saying "the new leaders are asses and their stupid new ideas will lead us to ruin."

Then, compare that thought to this comment from the current poll feedback:

Give the generics, XML and closure fanboyz the boot. No, wait. Before you kick them out force them to clean up the mess they created during the last decade. And don't forget the hundreds of thousands of open bug reports in the dreaded bugparade.

But what do we call the relative camps proposing and resisting closures and the other language changes that have been suggested? And is it as simple as pro- and anti-change? Sure, some people write Java 1.4 code because they just like it better, but are there camps that just want to see Java's development take a different course, say, preferring to expose new functionality through new libraries rather than messing around with the language syntax?