OT: What's wrong with Java-the-language

[Sean Kelly]

Julio César Carrascal Urquijo wrote:
> Yigal Chripun wrote:
>> What exactly is broken in Java that C# does better, in your opinion?
>> from what i see, anything that needs fixing is being fixed within the 
>> Java community and I personally trust their decisions a lot more than 
>> MS. Adding properties to a languages isn't considered "fixing" it, it's
>> just a convenience feature. On the other hand, removing covariance of 
>> return types is a very big mistake. there are others of course, but 
>> that one really pissed me off.
> 
> Auto-boxing in C# works as expected. In Java you have to take care of 
> implementation details that really don't concern to your code:
> 
> C#
>     Int32 a1 = 1, a2 = 1;
>     Int32 b1 = 128, b2 = 128;
>     Console.WriteLine(a1 == a2);    // True
>     Console.WriteLine(b1 == b2);    // True
> 
> Java-the-language:
>     Integer a1 = 1, a2 = 1;
>     Integer b1 = 128, b2 = 128;
>     System.out.println(a1 == a2);    // true
>     System.out.println(b1 == b2);    // false
> 
> This is because they cache the first 127 integers as a singleton while 
> you'll get different objects for 128 and up.
> 
> Also, Generics don't guarantee that a collection will only contain 
> elements of the same type:
> 
>     List<Integer> lint = new ArrayList();
>     List lobj = lint;
>     lobj.add("hello");    // WTF?
> 
> 
> And how come in Java you have to check your enums for null before using 
> them? :D
> 
>     void foo(Color c) {
>         if (null = c)
>             // throw something.
>         switch (c) {
>             case Color.red: break;
>             case Color.green: break;
>             case Color.blue: break;
>             default: break;
>         }
>     }
> 
> Java-the-vm is a great implementation and I expect with anticipation a 
> lot of useful languages to evolve on top of it, but Java-the-language 
> isn't really a great example of language design.

Technically, the auto-boxing issue is related to the implementation 
rather than the language design (unless that behavior is actually in the 
spec).  Generics, however, are utter garbage.  They are useful as a 
convenience tool for not manually casting and that's about it.  Opinions 
about MS aside, I think C# is a better designed language than Java.


Sean