I recently had to write my own equals and hashcode functions in a Java project (a language relatively new to me) just so I could store my custom object as a key

I recently had to write my own equals and hashcode functions in a Java project (a language relatively new to me) just so I could store my custom object as a key in a HashMap. The experience of doing this seemed so silly and unnecessarily low-level to me, that I almost abandoned the whole codebase and looked for another language to start over.