Looking for champion - std.lang.d.lex [Java and IDE's]

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 27/10/2010 05:39, Walter Bright wrote:
>> What I miss more in Java is not single structs (single values),
>
> There's a lot more to miss than that. I find Java code tends to be
> excessively complex, and that's because it lacks expressive power. It
> was summed up for me by a colleague who said that one needs an IDE to
> program in Java because with one button it will auto-generate 100 lines
> of boilerplate.

I've been hearing that a lot, but I find this to be excessively 
exaggerated. Can you give some concrete examples?

Because regarding excessive verbosity in Java, I cab only remember tree 
significant things at the moment (at least disregarding meta 
programming), and one of them is nearly as verbose in D as in Java:

  1) writing getters and setters for fields
  2) verbose syntax for closures. (need to use an anonymous class, outer 
variables must be final, and wrapped in an array if write access is needed)
  3) writing trivial constructors whose parameters mirror the fields, 
and then constructors assign the parameters to the fields.

I don't think 1 and 2 happens that often to be that much of an 
annoyance. (unless you're one of those Java persons that thinks that 
directly accessing the public field of another class is a sin, instead 
every single field must have getters/setters and never ever be public...)

As an additional note, I don't think having an IDE auto-generate X lines 
of boilerplate code is necessarily a bad thing. It's only bad if the 
alternative of having a better language feature would actually save me 
coding time (whether initial coding, or subsequent modifications) or 
improve code understanding. _Isn't this what matters?_


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer