The extra verbosity comes from the way java 8 is trying to make functional programming more comfortable while doing as little as possible to the language to do it. When you add all the sugar to make lines more expressive, then you'd hear complaints like the ones Scala gets about having too many ways of doing the same thing.

in scala, finding the first article looks like:

def topJavaArticle(articles:List[Article]) = articles.find(_.tags.contains("Java"))

which returns an Option[Article], so it handles the null check.

Since List in scala already handles functional constructs directly, then the filter example is just as easy:

def javaArticles(articles:List[Article]) = articles.filter(_.tags.contains("Java"))

group by author?

def byAuthor(articles:List[Article) = articles.groupBy(_.author)

And yes, that's the entire method definition, signature included. We could have added the return types for documentation if we felt like it.

You might still not like the style, but you can't say it's more verbose than the floor loop.

Backwards compatibility and design philosophy makes sure that Java 8 doesn't go hard enough on the sugar. It's why I am not optimistic of Java's future. There's awesome features out there in newer languages, like proper pattern matching, that Java just won't be able to borrow from functional languages.