3 ms·

Too bad immutability breaks the quite-ubiquitous-in-JVM-land Bean spec (and I wonder what one was smoking before drawing that spec). I think having proper sum-

by cies 3y ago

Too bad immutability breaks the quite-ubiquitous-in-JVM-land Bean spec (and I wonder what one was smoking before drawing that spec). I think having proper sum-types with pattern matching would have also made it a much better language.

cbm-vic-20 3y ago
It was designed when UML and tools like Rational Rose was being pushed hard by the big consulting firms on their clients as the One True Way to build Serious Business Software. JavaBeans was designed as a way to have a conventional interface that allows code components to be snapped into GUI applications. But someone thought it would be a great idea to use it everywhere else, too.
- cies 3y ago
  Can we all agree that the bean spec was not a good idea? No matter how old, or what other stupid ideas were fashionable back then. I cannot see how making things "beans" actually solves anything (besides maybe a slight reduction in boilerplate when (de)serializing bean-classes).
za3faran 3y ago
Java now has sum types (sealed types) with exhaustiveness checking, pattern matching for records, and more general destructuring in the works for classes.
fian 3y ago
Java has been around for a longish time. Around the early 2000's there was at least a perception that you should avoid creating too many objects as that carried performance overhead for construction and garbage collection. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/149563/should-we-avoid-object-creation-in-java https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1495... Immutable objects often require you to construct a new object to store an updated value and garbage collect the now unused previous object. So a lot of early Java code was written with mutable objects to avoid performance issues. The Java Bean spec was written in 1997: https://blog.joda.org/2014/11/the-javabeans-specification.html https://blog.joda.org/2014/11/the-javabeans-specification.ht...
- winrid 3y ago
  I didn't say make everything immutable. I just mean that if you want an object to be mutable, you need to say so.
The_Colonel 3y ago
Bean spec is in no way mandatory. Plenty of existing code doesn't follow the bean spec. Immutable Java classes have been in vogue for many, many years.

by cies 3y ago

cbm-vic-20 3y ago

It was designed when UML and tools like Rational Rose was being pushed hard by the big consulting firms on their clients as the One True Way to build Serious Business Software. JavaBeans was designed as a way to have a conventional interface that allows code components to be snapped into GUI applications. But someone thought it would be a great idea to use it everywhere else, too.

cies 3y ago
Can we all agree that the bean spec was not a good idea? No matter how old, or what other stupid ideas were fashionable back then. I cannot see how making things "beans" actually solves anything (besides maybe a slight reduction in boilerplate when (de)serializing bean-classes).

za3faran 3y ago

Java now has sum types (sealed types) with exhaustiveness checking, pattern matching for records, and more general destructuring in the works for classes.

fian 3y ago

Java has been around for a longish time. Around the early 2000's there was at least a perception that you should avoid creating too many objects as that carried performance overhead for construction and garbage collection. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/149563/should-we-avoid-object-creation-in-java https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1495... Immutable objects often require you to construct a new object to store an updated value and garbage collect the now unused previous object. So a lot of early Java code was written with mutable objects to avoid performance issues. The Java Bean spec was written in 1997: https://blog.joda.org/2014/11/the-javabeans-specification.html https://blog.joda.org/2014/11/the-javabeans-specification.ht...

winrid 3y ago
I didn't say make everything immutable. I just mean that if you want an object to be mutable, you need to say so.

The_Colonel 3y ago

Bean spec is in no way mandatory. Plenty of existing code doesn't follow the bean spec. Immutable Java classes have been in vogue for many, many years.