Totally agree with the concerns of the article. When you have to write a class of comparison functions like this in many types, it's arguably a violation of the

Totally agree with the concerns of the article. When you have to write a class of comparison functions like this in many types, it's arguably a violation of the Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle to implement comparison with unique, bespoke code in each type. Scenarios like this beg for a library or type system to make things easier. In Java's case, a better solution is Guava's ComparisonChain: public int compareTo(Foo that) { return ComparisonChain.start() .compare(this.aString, that.aString) .compare(this.anInt, that.anInt) .compare(this.anEnum, that.anEnum, Ordering.natural().nullsLast()) .result(); } There are similar utility methods for computing the object hashCode() and toString() and so on. See: https://github.com/google/guava/wiki/CommonObjectUtilitiesExplained https://github.com/google/guava/wiki/CommonObjectUtilitiesEx... There's still an opportunity to make mistakes like typos here, but due to the visual consistency it's less likely. Actual logic errors in the comparison are also less likely. A more powerful language than Java could potentially automate the entire implementation of methods like these (rather than just some of it), by reflecting over the set of fields in a class. Apache Lombok's annotations can kind of do this for a number of common boilerplate methods, though it looks like not yet for compareTo(): https://projectlombok.org/features/Data https://projectlombok.org/features/Data C# properties are an example of an improvement over Java, for example, but C# class implementors are still responsible for dealing with implementing Equals(), GetHashCode(), and ToString() just like Java, as far as I know. I would be interested to hear if there are any current programming languages that handle this use-case particularly well. Any Haskell, F#, or Scala folks out there who can comment?