Java was such a fractal of stupid design choices in its early years, and a lot of it is still there. OOP except when it's not (int vs Integer, [] arrays but also List et al), no unsigned number types, initially no way to do closures or pass methods around so everything had to be wrapped in super verbose bullshit, initially absolutely dogshit multiparadigm support and very noun-oriented, initally no generics either meaning everything's an Object, when it did get generics they had to do type erasure for backwards compatibility, etc etc etc

[–] magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 12 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Also: everything is nullable. There are no safety guarantees to ensure you’ve done the necessary null checks. And if you miss your program will crash.

[–] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Oh yeah how did I forget the billion dollar mistake, definitely one of the worst misfeatures of Java

[–] magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I think having null is great in some cases where you need to represent missing value. It’s just that there’s no good way to know for sure if you need to do null checks or not. The only way around it is to do null checks everywhere, which no one wants to do because fuck that. Nowadays there’s Optional which solves some of this, but it was introduced way too late.

If I were to redesign Java the first thing I would do is to add a nullable keyword or something.

[–] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I think having null is great in some cases where you need to represent missing value.

Option types or sum types would probably be a much less terrible choice for this, although I guess some sort of nullable keyword counts as a sum type

[–] magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Well, anything that can be captured at compile time or by the IDE is infinitely better than the situation we have today.

[–] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 0 points 7 months ago

Ha yeah, just about anything is better than the current status quo

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Regarding erasure, this is a good read. https://cr.openjdk.org/~briangoetz/valhalla/erasure.html

[–] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Great article, thanks for the link! It makes good points that I hadn't really considered; I've probably just been cranky about it because I've preferred heterogenous translations

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 7 months ago

Glad you liked it!