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More Thoughts on Tiger


By Allen Holub
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July 1, 2004 —  (Page 1 of 2)
A month or so ago I talked about my disappointment in some of the features of Sun's Tiger (J2SE 1.5) release ("Missed Opportunities," May 1). This month I want to talk about a couple more problems that I see in the new version.

As before, bear in mind that there's a lot of good stuff in Java 1.5. It seems appropriate to devote column space to the features that might give you grief, however, since you're less likely to hear about it from the official documentation.

STATIC IMPORTSLet's start with static imports. Given this code:

package com.holub.test;

public class Constants

{ public static final String HELLO = "hello";

public static String global = " goodbye ";

public static String noNoNo()

{ return "NoNoNo!";

}

}

you can do this:

import static com.holub.test.Constants.*;

public class Foo

{ //...

public static void main(String[] args)

{ System.out.println( HELLO + global + noNoNo() );

}

}

There's no class-name prefix in front of the HELLO or global references or the call to noNoNO();

Importing a global constant like HELLO is relatively (though not completely) harmless. (The problem is that the static final reference might point to an object that can change state. A static final is not a constant. The lack of a true constant in Java has been a problem from day one.)

Nonetheless, I might be happy with static imports if they were restricted to static final fields. Unfortunately, they aren't. You can also use static import to access what amounts to global variables and functions. I've deliberately used the word "function" rather than "method" in the last sentence. The function noNoNO() is not really a method of a class of objects-it is not called to handle a message passed to some object; noNoNO() is a procedural function, pure and simple.

Yes, Virginia, you can now write a C program in Java. (In fact, if you're really a hard-core C programmer, they've added System.out.printf(), which works just like the C function with the same name.) The language is just too complex to justify its use in non-OO applications. Introducing global variables and global functions is a giant step backward.



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