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Ironically the Java ecosystem could stand to use some garbage collection of its own: there's a ton of old, outdated info out there that both colors people's imp

Ironically the Java ecosystem could stand to use some garbage collection of its own: there's a ton of old, outdated info out there that both colors people's impressions of the language and teaches new players a whole manner of bad habits. I appreciate what this article's going for and hope there'll be follow-ups. I use Java daily and though there's undoubtedly room for improvement (I'm looking forward to when tooling better supports stuff added in Java 8), I think a lot of the negativity that surrounds it is undeserved. There's definitely bloated XML-infested frameworks out there but the core's a real workhorse.

Terr_ 12y ago
> old, outdated info out there I'd love it if the JDK had a "learner mode" that disabled interned string literals. Then newbies experimenting with `assert(str1 == str2)` wouldn't leap to false conclusions.
- lmm 12y ago
  == should never have been used for that method, which is very rarely what you want. The right thing is probably to deprecate == on nonprimitive types, replacing it with a longer name that's clearer about what it means.
  - cdmckay 12y ago
    Or make == call .equals and add a .referenceEquals method for the case where you actually want to check for reference equality. This is what Scala and C# do.
    - lmm 12y ago
      That would indeed be nice, but is incompatible with Java's approach to backwards compatibility.
pjmlp 12y ago
Some pruning is planned for Java 9, at least is was announced so at Java One last year.
- twic 12y ago
  It's not just the JDK that needs pruning, though. It's the ecosystem of third party libraries, and the millions of pages on blogs and StackOverflow (and shudder JavaRanch) that contain bad, outdated advice, following which will make people hate Java.
  - uptownJimmy 12y ago
    Yeah, as an obsessive newbie/student, I can attest that JavaRanch is almost enough to put you off Java forever...

Terr_ 12y ago

> old, outdated info out there I'd love it if the JDK had a "learner mode" that disabled interned string literals. Then newbies experimenting with `assert(str1 == str2)` wouldn't leap to false conclusions.

lmm 12y ago
== should never have been used for that method, which is very rarely what you want. The right thing is probably to deprecate == on nonprimitive types, replacing it with a longer name that's clearer about what it means.
- cdmckay 12y ago
  Or make == call .equals and add a .referenceEquals method for the case where you actually want to check for reference equality. This is what Scala and C# do.
  - lmm 12y ago
    That would indeed be nice, but is incompatible with Java's approach to backwards compatibility.

pjmlp 12y ago

Some pruning is planned for Java 9, at least is was announced so at Java One last year.

twic 12y ago
It's not just the JDK that needs pruning, though. It's the ecosystem of third party libraries, and the millions of pages on blogs and StackOverflow (and shudder JavaRanch) that contain bad, outdated advice, following which will make people hate Java.
- uptownJimmy 12y ago
  Yeah, as an obsessive newbie/student, I can attest that JavaRanch is almost enough to put you off Java forever...