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Have Generics Killed Java?
- gills 16y agoEr...[if you have the misfortune of being paid to work in Java] they remove a pile of type-casting cruft and make code more useful to large and/or transient teams. The author conveniently glosses over the type-casting from pre-generics Java and instead compares to Ruby. Duh...of course Ruby is a cleaner read. But compare learning a new API: // pretty evil List<Thing> getTheThings(); // really evil List getTheThings(); Or iteration: // pretty evil for (Thing t: getTheThings()) {...} // kill me now for (Iterator it = getTheThings().iterator(); it.hasNext()) { Thing t = (Thing) it.next(); ... }
- mhd 16y agoThere's just no real alternative to generics in Java. It's either that, casting (terminally insecure) or a more modern type system, which would be a huuuge change for the language (and in which case, you might as well use Scala). If you want to complain about things that make code harder to understand, I wonder why the author doesn't rant about annotations.
- mfukar 16y agoThey provide more type safety and not syntactic sugar. One cannot have complete type safety at runtime using type casts; if he thinks he can, he needs to take a simple programming course again. If the OP wanted readability, he could use iterators. It's amazingly clear: private void printCollection(Collection c) { Iterator<String> i = c.iterator(); while(i.hasNext()) { System.out.println("Item: "+i.next()); } }