Java Gets Templates

lastberserker writes "Call them all you want - generics, parametrized types, thingamagic mumbojumbo - but (tada!) Java gets templates in 1.5 release. Nice landing after 5+ years of dancing around a bush. Competition is good, pardon my pun."

Comments

Re:Nooooooo

[Khazunga]

The language should not be expected to prevent you from defining functions named toString() just because they don't perform the function you think they should. Why should it be any different with operators?

Operators, to be usable, should be very terse. Three characters maximum is a good recommendation. Most operators are one or two characters.

With that short a definition, the operator's meaning must be inferred by the reader's culture. + is the arithmetic sum operator. We know what it does after working with it for years.

Methods, on the other hand, can have extremely verbose names. That is one of the good things on the Java coding guidelines. Names are verbose. There's no strcmp. There's String.compareTo. If the compare is case insensitive, there's String.compareToIgnoreCase.

Objectively, you are right. There's no guarantee a function performs what its name implies. However, if a function's name is incorrect, I can smack the developer on the head. If an operator's name is incorrect, the developer may have done it right, since having an operator named multiplyTransposeAndNormalize is awkward. It's the whole concept of operator overloading that is wrong.

Too little, too late

[MobyDisk]

Too late:
Sun ignored requests from the developer community to extend the Java core language. Now they finally listen, after Microsoft copied Java with C# and added generics. This is why Java has gone from the hottest thing since Starbucks, to yet another language. They didn't listen to their user base until 2 years after it was too late.
Lessons learned:
This is also why Microsoft is so successful - they constantly innovate, rather than sitting on their market dominance. I foresee Sun suddenly trying to play catch-up with new core Java features. I will enjoy reading the spin Sun puts on this, after saying for years that none of these features were necessary.

Re:AAAAAAAAArgh -- missing the point sooo badly

[nojomofo]

I don't necessarily disagree with everything you're saying here, but a few things drew my attention....

You have a conversion operator called toString

Um, no. You have Object.toString() which is a method, not an operator.

There are accepted standards for how we write certain concepts such as addition or strict ordering, and operator overloading is necessary to allow user-defined types to meet those standards...

It sounds like you're talking about why operator overloading is necessary for C. For one, "user-defined types" don't exist in Java. Second, I don't agree with what you're saying. What about Lisp? Do you think that Lisp is a poor language because you don't add two numbers by saying 1 + 2? Lisp breaks your "accepted standards for how we write... addition".