Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

It might be crazy but I like this kind of DSLization of Java a lot

I've seen a pretty big move in popular libraries to fluent interfaces. It does a pretty good job of getting over the verbosity in Java (at least where the verbosity hurts readability).

Examples like Guava:

   Cache<String, User> userCache = CacheBuilder.newBuilder()
      .initialCapacity(7)
      .expireAfterWrite(20, TimeUnit.MINUTES)
      .build();

Or Hamcrest:

   assertThat(result, containsString("OK"));

Or Rest-Assured:

   expect().statusCode(200).when().get("/user/1");

I think it would really shine with IDE support. It probably wouldn't even be that hard to do (famous last words). I think I'll take a stab at it.

I like it as well, and have done similar things by creating input/output classes to use as "structs" when the list of parameters gets unweildy or when I want multiple returns.

When "the list of parameters gets unweildy" and "I want multiple returns" are to major indicators that you got some anti-patterns going on. I think the refactoring that you need might a new class with a single responsibility.

Or they are indicators that you have experience in languages that allow such designs, and would like java to introduce them. My biggest problem with java is that it tried to be a single paradigm langues: object oriented. While it was doing that, people worked on developing other methods. Concepts from these other systems are beggining to creep into java. For example, generics are a functional concept, as are lambdas which will be introduced in the next version.

It doesn't seem all that crazy to me. I wouldn't be surprised to see an ML programmer write something like

  datatype name = Name of string

and this is just the way to express that in Java.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com