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Comment by sbov | Hacker News Reader

Some like to say that you should never write clever code. But clever to who? Some people lambdas, map, reduce, and even polymorphism are clever. So in a vacuum the statement is meaningless.

Whenever you're writing code you need to know your audience. Is the Haskell solution really that clever to someone who uses Haskell on a daily basis?

That said, I always liked the saying: it's easier to write code than read it. Which means, that if you're writing code at "maximum cleverness" you're writing code you won't be able to read.

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My rule of thumb is that I attempt to write code that a junior programmer whose experience is limited to a little more than having taken a course in the language and has done a couple tutorials on the framework(s) can maintain. I see so many developers try to squeeze every new language feature or loads of esoteric library use cases into their code because they learned something and feel like it MUST belong in the production code. Sometimes you have to write complicated code, but 99% of the time it should be possible to write very simple code using only the most commonly used language features.

For all of Java's pitfalls, this is one of the things it really has going for it. The language itself is extremely simple. I think adding properties instead of the weirdness of getters and setters would take it to peak simplicity and straight-forwardness. (Also, maybe eliminate inheritance and force interfaces and composition instead.)

> eliminate inheritance

Why would you want that? Wouldn't eliminating inheritance add a lot of boilerplate code?

I think default methods take care of most of the places where boilerplate would be required. The abstract collections are a great example of this; most of the methods required of a `Collection` can be implemented from a small subset. Sometimes you'll re-implement other operations anyway for efficiency gains, but that's supported with default methods also.

However, I may just be weird. My Java coding style is probably closer to Rust or Haskell. Lots of interfaces defining my type requirements, and static methods to implement compound operations on those interfaces. I like this because it's easily testable and traceable.

You can use composition to reduce boilerplate as well. Composition > inheritance is something that is emphasized greatly in the React community.

Composition increases boilerplate code. With simple inheritance hierarchies there is an inherent advantage in this regard. If you use inheritance you don't need to encapsulate the "base" object and implement all the methods of the interfaces doing most of the time just a routing to the base object, you can just extend from the abstract base object and implement only the methods that you need. Obviously if your hierarchy is complex then it is much better to use composition to have a better decoupling, but it has nothing to do with decreasing the boilerplate code. Composition and inheritance are just two tools for different jobs. If someone says Composition > Inheritance it is like saying Screwdriver > Hammer, a complete non-sense. There is no tool that is inherently good or bad, it all depends how the craftsman uses it (or don't) in a good or bad way for the job.

> If someone says Composition > Inheritance it is like saying Screwdriver > Hammer, a complete non-sense.

You're stretching a bit too far. Inheritance is nothing but composition with some default implicit virtual method routing. You admit as much in your comment. If you want tools, it's more like a hammer vs a mallet and a prybar. Same tools, same purpose, just one is bundled.

The purpose is completely different. You use interfaces and composition to decouple the implementation of some objects, you use inheritance to define some object hierarchy. Inheritance specifies the is a relationship, Composition the has a. As you can see these two are totally different concepts.

What is an is a relationship? It is the promise that a type implements a contract. That sounds like an interface to me; implementing interfaces also forms is a relationships. Allow interfaces to be externally defined for a type, and now you have Haskell classes or Rust traits. This isn't a new idea I'm proposing here; it's quite workable and very straight-forward.

EDIT: To be clear, in inheritance, the contract being implemented is the implicit contract specified by the parent type. (Assuming you're following the Liskov substitution principle, which you should be.)

you were not speaking about interfaces, you were speaking about composition. As I said composition and inheritance are two completely different concepts. And I'm not making up the definitions, is a and has a are very well known concepts in computer science. You can argue ad libitum, but this doesn't change the definition. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Has-a https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is-a

I'm starting to feel like you're not actually reading anything I write. I specifically include interfaces. To quote myself:

> Also, maybe eliminate inheritance and force interfaces and composition instead.

Implementing an interface meets all the conditions of an is a relationship; no redefinition is necessary. [0] After all, interfaces are nothing more than abstract base classes with no method bodies to inherit. I haven't argued anywhere that composition defines an is a relationship, so I have no idea where you're pulling that from.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is-a#Java

EDIT: I really like this article you linked. It has all sorts of things that help me prove my point. For instance, the Rectangle example from the LSP section. If Rectangle were an interface:

    interface IRectangle {
        double getWidth();
        double getHeight();
    }

It's trivial to implement concrete Rectangle and Square classes that don't violate any principles. Inheritance, on the other hand, is pretty much guaranteed to be broken as long as Rectangle is mutable, because Square cannot add additional constraints to Rectangle and still pretend to be a Rectangle in all use-cases.

You wrote this: "Inheritance is nothing but composition with some default implicit virtual method routing." In response to my post where I said that inheritance and composition are two different tools and doesn't make sense to say that one is always better than the other. So it seems to me that you think that inheritance and composition are the same concepts given your words that I quoted and given that you were arguing with my definition of different tools.

Edit: I don't see any composition in your example, just an interface implementation.

OK, I should have stated that inheritance is a bundling of multiple tools, composition and default implicit virtual method routing being two of them. It also creates an is a relationship, which in my version of an inheritance-less world would be handled explicitly via interfaces, which I included in my original "toolbox".

EDIT: Notice how I can enforce the invariants of `Square`, while composing a `Rectangle` and implementing `IRectangle`. This works because composition allows me to encapsulate the problematic setter methods of `Rectangle`, which is not something I can do if I inherit it.

    class Square implements IRectangle {
        private final Rectangle rectangle;

        public Square(final double size) {
            this.rectangle = new Rectangle(size, size);
        }

        public double getWidth() {
            return this.rectangle.getWidth();
        }

        public double getHeight() {
            return this.rectangle.getHeight();
        }

        public double getSize() {
            return this.rectangle.getWidth();
        }

        public double setSize(final double size) {
            this.rectangle.setWidth(size);
            this.rectangle.setHeight(size);
        }
    }

Adding properties would just make the language MORE complex. Then you would have fields, getters/setters AND properties. That said, a "property" keyword that auto-generated default getters/setters would be nice.

This was one of things that always bothered me about C#, What is the point of properties. What do the offer that public fields don't?

You don't need getters and setters in c#. If you don't have any side effect in a read-write property you can just use an automatic property. The same for read only properties that don't need to be recalculated on the fly. And I hope that I don't need to explain why using a write only property is almost always a code smell. In the other cases you can use a normal property with a backing field. If your code is well written and you use the appropriate tools, only rarely you need normal properties (that are as annoying as getters/setters).

What do getters and setters offer that public fields don't? Properties offer exactly the same advantage as getters and setters, fields encapsulation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_encapsulation No wonder that you don't understand properties if you don't know why getters and setters are useful.

I prefer Swift's solution, where fields and properties are unified. Makes so much more sense.

Java is a quite awful language honestly. And I use it everyday at work. Generics implementation with type erasure is a pain and complicates things a lot. There is no automatic static type inference and before Java 7 you had to specify twice the generic types in the same statement. This adds a lot of "complexity" or noise when reading some code. Checked exceptions..do we want to speak about all the complexity that they add? Before Java 8 there was absolutely no first class support to closures, and if you wanted to have something equivalent you had to use an anonymous inner class... Very simple, eh? All the streams (as in input/output streams) are heavily used and while sometime they are useful, they complicate needlessly the code. The streams implementation (as in the Linq-like feature) is more complex than Linq. Honestly I can't say that Java is a simple language. It may be true if you just use loops and basic statements, but you can say the same for pretty much every other high level language. Finally I'm quite perplexed for the reasons why you want to kill inheritance. While it is true that when it is abused is bad, ditching it completely is wrong because used in the right way can make you code simpler.

I think there's two definitions of simple being used between you and I. Let's use different words instead: obviousness and terseness. Obviousness is how clear the goal of the code is; terseness is how much typing it takes to get there. I'm using simple to mean obviousness; this seems to be in line with the article, as being "clever" typically means exchanging obviousness for terseness. You seem to be taking terseness as your definition of simple.

Now Java is the king of obviousness; it's very clear exactly what is being done on every line of code. It pays for it in being very wordy. I don't like inheritance because it breaks obviousness; it's no longer obvious where a virtual call is actually going to be served. With composition, the immediate object has to serve the call, even if it's just to delegate it. The only virtual calls would be dispatching calls to interface methods. And this style isn't expensive after JIT; inlining these kinds of delegations is its primary optimization. (Think getter-method chains that return a field value, a common pattern in Java.)

Lambdas were a step towards terseness, but they sacrifice obviousness to get there. It hides things... What SAM type is a lambda implementing? You have to check to call site; the lambda itself won't tell you. The anonymous class syntax tells you exactly what is being implemented, but that means you have to type more to get there.

Now, I like properties because IMO they optimize both obviousness and terseness. You are obviously making a single property with a getter and a setter, as opposed to defining each separately. And you are more terse by removing the need to define each separately.

I don't think Java is obvious at all apart the aforementioned simple statements. With generics you have actually no idea of what type you receive at runtime, you receive just an object. If the goal of the code is to return some sensible default for a specific type in Java you cannot use generics. And it's not obvious at all for anyone that doesn't know the generics implementation details. About closures, do you think that it is more obvious to define an entire anonymous inner class when you really just need to define a method delegate or an anonymous method? For me it's completely counterintuitive other than it makes my eyes bleed. If I need a local variable I obviously define it, I don't create a class which exposes an encapsulated field and use it. And it's exactly the same thing when I need an anonymous method. When the goal is reading a file why should be more obvious to create a buffered reader that encapsulates a file reader that wraps a file and use it to read when I can just do File.ReadAllLines() in C#? What is the added value of calling stream() on everything before using any enumerable? In C# obviously you just call Extension Methods on an IEnumerable. You even get IntelliSense. Why should be obvious to call stream() on an object that is already a collection?

> With generics you have actually no idea of what type you receive at runtime, you receive just an object.

That's kind of the point of generics? I don't understand this argument at all. If you need a specific kind of type, then bound the generic using `extend` and you can use the bounding type's methods and fields. [0]

You're still using a different definition of obvious, despite my having defined it for this use case. For instance:

> Why should be obvious to call stream() on an object that is already a collection?

That's the very definition of obvious. You are making it quite clear that you intend to use this collection as a stream. It's extremely obvious. Same with the buffered reader; Readers are unbuffered, and it's very obvious that you are buffering the reader when you wrap it. (Also, Java has `java.nio.Files.readAllLines` [1], so I'm not sure what you're going on about.)

Extention methods are very non-obvious; where is an extension method defined? The answer is anywhere; it can live in any type you imported. It's not obvious looking at the line of code where execution is going to flow. (And yes, an IDE will track it down for you. Just because an IDE can do the work for you, doesn't mean that there's not work to be done.)

[0] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/generics/bounded...

[1] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/nio/file/Files...

The point of generics is to pass generic arguments to a method/class, as the name says. In Java you are losing every type information and at runtime your method will accept objects, not arguments with a generic type. There are several situation in which preserving the type information is extremely useful. For this reason in Java you still find a lot of libraries that receive a type as argument, while in C# you can just specify the generic type. For me it is far more obvious in the c# way given that I cannot see why I should pass the type of an argument in a generic method. For the streams it is honestly ridiculous. I want to apply a filter, a map, a reduce or wathever to an Iterable. The stream is a very well known and completely different concept and it is widely used in reactive programming, they just stole that concept to use it in a completely non obvious way. For the other streams I still can't see how it is obvious that I should do manually all that wrapping that is completely counterintuitive and makes you lose track of the code purpose. Finally extension methods are perfectly obvious. They are just syntactic sugar for static methods, I hope that at least you agree that static method are the gist of obviousness.

I've got plenty of dislike for type erasure, and I do agree that it makes the language more complicated. An instance where the Java language was sacrificed to ease virtual machine implementation and backwards compatibility.

> The stream is a very well known and completely different concept and it is widely used in reactive programming, they just stole that concept to use it in a completely non obvious way.

Java streams seem to meet the ideas of stream processing to me. Given a sequence, apply transformations in order, possibly in a transparently parallel fashion. Compare the Wiki definition with the `BaseStream` interface documentation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_processing

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/stream/Ba...

> Finally extension methods are perfectly obvious. They are just syntactic sugar for static methods, I hope that at least you agree that static method are the gist of obviousness.

Yes, I of course agree. My problem is that extension methods hide where they live, by pretending to live on the type. And to be fair, I have the same issue with static imports in Java. When I look at a function or method call, it should be immediately apparent where control flow is going to go. That's not the case with either static imports or extension functions; I have to resolve the method name first.

My measuring stick for "cleverness" has two axes.

The first axis is how far away you are from the naive solution(s). The further away you are, the longer it takes someone else to understand what you're doing. In some cases you have to take a non-obvious approach, usually for performance reasons in my experience. Fortunately, commenting is a good way to explain when you are using a non-obvious solution to a problem.

The other axis is how many edge cases your solution has relative to the general case. The negative connotation of "clever" is that the clever approach works but is over-specialized for the specific set of cases where it's used. It might not solve the general problem, but it solves enough specific cases of the general problem for your current needs. Then when for some reason the larger program changes (new feature?) and the solution is expected to handle a new case, it fails, and now you've got a clever non-working solution.

To me, code that is clever in the sense of "non-obvious algorithm" is fine when it is needed. Just comment and explain it well. The problem is when your clever code comes with a side effect of brittleness. Either document the edge cases thoroughly, or use an approach with fewer edge cases.

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