It's not and anyone arguing to the contrary is wrong. The article is way off base on this. You could argue it's purely syntactic sugar, but really, it's barel

It's not and anyone arguing to the contrary is wrong. The article is way off base on this. You could argue it's purely syntactic sugar, but really, it's barely even: it's just alternate syntax. People arguing against this are failing to understand that different languages have different syntaxes. person.getName() is the same as getName(person). In the former it's an implicit parameter, in the latter it's explicit. Or, looking at it differently, one is a syntax for functional calls that prepends the first argument as a target, and one is a syntax that accepts the target as the first argument. With Java 8 method references, you can see this a bit more clearly. You could, for instance, do this to get a function without the implicit this: Function<Person, String> getName = Person::getName; getName.apply(new Person());