Comments on: How Java needs to become cleaner

By: james

james — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:24:36 +0000

Get rid of methods entirely and replace with fields and closures.

By: TapaGeuR » ITGIF – “IT-God” It’s Friday #15

TapaGeuR » ITGIF – “IT-God” It’s Friday #15 — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 18:54:27 +0000

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By: stephan

stephan — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:26:30 +0000

@Cay: But in Java we use newlines to denote new “sentences”. If we would write each sentence in a new line in English, we would not need “.”

By: Cay Horstmann

Cay Horstmann — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:56:35 +0000

I agree with almost your entire list, except for the humble semicolon. As much as I like Scala, I do not like the games of “let’s see if we can omit a few more tokens here and there” and “oh look, if we remove this line ending, the meaning changes completely”.

Why do we use punctuation in English? You don’t speak commas and periods, but you still write them, and it helps us read faster.

THEN AGAIN THE ROMANS DIDN’T THEY JUST WROTE LIKE THIS WITHOUT ANY PUNCTUATION MARKS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT OF COURSE YES I KNOW THEY WROTE IN LATIN BUT YOU GET THE IDEA CHEERS CAY

By: stephan

stephan — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:17:02 +0000

@Dan: Care to elaborate?

By: Dan Howard

Dan Howard — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:14:02 +0000

The blog title should be “Visual Beginner features I’d like in a language that targets the JVM”

By: stephan

stephan — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 05:40:11 +0000

@Rafael: See my Magical Code Post, I’ve mentioned Lambock there

http://codemonkeyism.com/beware-magical-code/

@Eric: I’m very careful with inheritance, so I’m not really needing final methods – they could help though (I rarely inherit, mostly compose)

@Josh: Scala is FP/OO and most Scala enthusiasts are too, otherwise they would use Clojure. So I didn’t mean Scala with “FP view”

By: josh

josh — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:42:46 +0000

> the FP few of no-objects just lists/tuples.

If you use Scala you should know it’s not about ‘no objects’. For shame!

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 22:37:52 +0000

Funny that you don’t (and no one) insist on having final methods by default. We had a big discussion about this at work. “Effective Java” insists on “design for inheritance” otherwise mark your methods as final. I personally see little added value in doing this (whereas the sealed keyword in Scala adds lots of value for pattern matching). What’s your take on that?

Eric.

By: Rafael Naufal

Rafael Naufal — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:18:00 +0000

There is a project called Project Lombok in which getter and setter methods are created through annotation on the member fields. If you use Eclipse as your favourite IDE, you can see right from the Outline view the Getter/Setter methods that were generated.

By: stephan

stephan — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:20:06 +0000

@Lars: Oh and I love a lot of things about Groovy :-) (but use Scala)

By: stephan

stephan — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:17:07 +0000

@Lars: As stated there might be reasons not to use Groovy, otherwise I agree with you (there are several Groovy posts from 2007 on this blog ;-)

And I assume quite a high percentage of Java developers do not want to change – they see no reason. The blogosphere is a niche.

By: Lars Fischer

Lars Fischer — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:00:47 +0000

Sounds a lot like Groovy. It shouldn’t be that hard to learn Groovy syntax for a Java Developer.

By: stephan

stephan — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:54:48 +0000

@Rick: But I really would be interested in experience reports of large scale web app deployments of C# on Linux.

By: stephan

stephan — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:53:54 +0000

@Rick: It isn’t? Perhaps things changed, but everytime I take a deeper look into alternative C# implemtations I read about slow and memory leaking GCs/VM, about bugs, about incomplete and incompatible APIs, about implementations that lag years behind MS C#. But as I’ve noted, things might have changed.

By: Rick

Rick — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:50:22 +0000

Stephan, C# is obviously NOT Windows only.

By: Mirko

Mirko — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:48:05 +0000

Well, I use the default package protected scope in Java rather often for unit testing (tests are in the same package as the SUT). While I agree that public for methods could be a default, I do not want to loose the default scope, maybe a new keyword like “pprotected” would do the trick then.
Coming from a python background, tuples would be fine.

Regards
Mirko

By: stephan

stephan — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:28:17 +0000

@MaggieL: See my comments about Scala / Groovy.

By: stephan

stephan — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:27:34 +0000

@Ben: I agree, and I still don’t follow the FP few of no-objects just lists/tuples. If needed, a class is always the better choice. But sometimes a tuple works. @Data might – as you’ve said – solved this too.

By: stephan

stephan — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:26:07 +0000

@lbertrand: See what I said about Scala and Groovy. Otherwise I will take a look :-)

By: stephan

stephan — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:24:34 +0000

@Mikhail: I know. Most won’t use C# because C# is Windows only.

By: stephan

stephan — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:23:55 +0000

@Rahul: I’m using currently Scala for everything I start.

I estimate 80% of companies can’t or won’t switch from Java to Groovy or Scala for various reasons – including developers who don’t want to switch, remember the blogosphere is a miniscule part of developers. Often there is no managagment buy in or sometimes costs are too high. AND currently Groovy and Scala tools (IDE in particular, but code coverage, static code analysis etc) are sub-par.

If you want this and can switch, sure you can use Groovy or Scala.

By: Mikhail

Mikhail — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:52:19 +0000

Looks almost like C#. Check it ourself: http://www.25hoursaday.com/CsharpVsJava.html

By: Ben Darfler

Ben Darfler — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:08:40 +0000

I go back and forth on tuples. However, and interesting point has been brought up on the Java Posse recently. If the overhead of creating basic data classes is lowered then it makes the need for tuples less since you can just create a quick, nicely named and typed data object. In Scala there is the Case Class and project Lombok is trying to do something similar in Java with @Data. In fact, if properties were added it would solve most of this (though hashcode and equals would still need to be attended to).

By: Shirish

Shirish — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:37:56 +0000

IMO, Closures for Java are coming in JDK7
http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/closures_in_jdk_7

By: josh

josh — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:27:44 +0000

Rahul is right. With this list you’d probably be much happier using Scala or Groovy.

By: lbertrand

lbertrand — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:13:29 +0000

You are describing Fantom… See here http://fantom.org

By: Cedric

Cedric — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:05:39 +0000

I agree with your list, with my top priorities being type inference and support for properties.

I’m ambivalent about “public methods by default” and wondering if the default shouldn’t be private (one thing for sure: the current default is dumb).

On one hand, forcing developers to put a “public” in front of their methods will make them ponder whether it’s really what they want, on the other hand, maybe most methods tend to be public, so making this the default would reduce the noise.

I’m also a bit on the fence about tuples since I don’t need to return multiple values that often, but I think that as long as tuples are statically typed, there is probably little harm in supporting them.

–
Cedric

By: MaggieL

MaggieL — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:01:33 +0000

Yeah, what was it you didn’t like about Scala again?

By: Rahul G

Rahul G — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:59:20 +0000

Why not just use Scala or Groovy instead ?