What is the point of this article? To vent about how much they dislike Java? It's clearly not to educate, as the least they could do is try researching how to d

What is the point of this article? To vent about how much they dislike Java? It's clearly not to educate, as the least they could do is try researching how to do repeating annotations in JDK 8: http://softwarecave.org/2014/05/20/repeating-annotations-in-java-8/ http://softwarecave.org/2014/05/20/repeating-annotations-in-... And it's clear from reading the annotation documentation that null is not a valid value. It might be surprising to some developers, but it was a conscious decision made by the spec designers. It also shouldn't be a surprise to the author that Java is smart enough to forbid you to set a null value regardless of whether it was specified directly or they used a constant: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1178104/error-setting-a-default-null-value-for-an-annotations-field http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1178104/error-setting-a-d... "I hate X" piece like this do nothing to advance the discussion on language features. They only add a bunch of noise and ramp up the flamewars on both sides.