r/java • u/lukaseder • Sep 19 '18

JEP draft: Concise Method Bodies

http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/8209434
56 Upvotes

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1

u/donte9181 Sep 21 '18

Shorter != better.

This feels like it's solving a non-problem. Not once have I ever felt that I was unable to complete a project on time because I had to type some curly braces for trivial methods. On top of that, I don't even type them - my IDE does, so I actually type the same number of characters the "long way" today as I would in the "short way" described here, so it doesn't affect my coding velocity at all.

What it does do is make code significantly harder to read/understand because now you're overloading the arrow/method-reference notation. Currently it's limited to method invocation but now you're suggesting that it could be used while defining methods, too. It requires extra (unnecessary) brain cycles to figure out where the method definition ends and what it's actually doing - especially in the examples w/ multiple arguments.

It's unnecessary complexity that adds to the amount of mental cycles required to consume existing Java code - which is 90% of our jobs. This will make reading Java code harder while having 0 effect on our ability to write code efficiently.

This seems like one of those things someone suggested because they saw something similar in another language and thought it was cool, but will only make Java worse. Keep Java simple. Keep Java readable. Let your IDE write the boilerplate for you.

1

u/lukaseder Sep 21 '18

So, you don't use lambdas but keep writing anonymous classes?

Stream.of(1, 2, 3)
      .filter(new Predicate<Integer>() {
          @Override
          public boolean test(Integer i) {
              return i % 2 == 0;
          }
      })
      .map(new Function<Integer, String>() {
          @Override
          public String apply(Integer i) {
              return i.toString();
          }
      })
      .collect(toList());

0

u/coderguyagb Sep 21 '18

When it make the code easier to understand, yes.