Discussion on: Modernizing Java - A language feature wish list (Part 1)

I liked reading this, thanks for posting! I whole-heartedly support features that help reduce the clutter of null checks.

But I've worked with languages that have the "syntactic sugar" for getters and setters, and I found the experience unpleasant. Maybe it's years (and years...) of ingrained habit, but the difference between a variable assignment and a function call is important, especially when reading through code and debugging.

But here's the real hitch as to why it's problematic to have the compiler "figure out" what you mean when you type, foo.name:

public class Fizz
{
    public String name = "fizz";

    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }
}

public class Buzz extends Fizz
{
    public String name = "buzz";

    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }
}

public class Main
{
    static public void main(String[] args) {
        Fizz fizz = new Buzz();
        System.out.println("fizz.name     : " + fizz.name);
        System.out.println("fizz.getName(): " + fizz.getName());
    }
}

Output:

fizz.name     : fizz
fizz.getName(): buzz

That's because Java dispatches to member fields based on the reference type, (Fizz in this example), but dispatches to methods based on the object type (Buzz).

Having the compiler "figure out" what you mean requires accounting for this, which requires that developers memorize yet more arcane rules.

I'm all for simplicity and readability, but I think in this case it's an illusion. Typing & reading getFoo() aren't the hard part of coding. Understanding what the code does is the hard part. And I think adding this syntactic sugar make the hard part marginally harder in order to make the easy part easier. I just don't think that's a good trade-off.

I have similar thoughts on letting the compiler resolve Foo.getName() as Foo.class.getName(). (Though I've been doing a lot of work with Jackson XML parsing/generation lately, and having to pass Foo.class as a type token is... unattractive.)

Thanks for posting this. I like mulling new language features, and I'm now curious to check out Ceylon. Thanks for the pointer!