> You call that a problem, I call it flexibility. You misunderstand my point, I think. Java already offers you all that flexibility with regular classes, and d

> You call that a problem, I call it flexibility. You misunderstand my point, I think. Java already offers you all that flexibility with regular classes, and data classes are just syntax sugar for creating regular classes. It's not that data classes have a "problem" so much as that they're just yet another syntactic construct, while records and enums are something else. Of course, a hosted language (let alone one that targets multiple platforms) is quite limited in the kinds of constructs it can offer, as it has no influence over the runtime and the ecosystem, but it's still important to understand that data classes and records are features of a different nature. > So, unless something changed there, people have been using them wrong for the last 20+ years. Regular classes can, indeed, mimic the behaviour of enums and records, but the reason enums and records were added was that these construct provide guarantees of correct use, guarantees that the language and the runtime now rely on. True, we can and did live without them, and they're not absolutely critical. But they're still powerful, and their power is not a result of their succinct syntax but of their behaviour.