"Java has been ruined by the push to include everyone's pet feature."
Care to expand on this? Java is very careful to release new features.
Care to expand on this? Java is very careful to release new features.
Java has made a U-turn in adding streams and related functional features on top of a language that used to be strongly for OOP (actually defining the meaning of OOP for a generation of developers.)
These different paradigms together make for code that does not read the same no matter who writes it.
I love how Go code usually ends up being extremely similar, no matter who write is. (Actually, Kubernetes is a counter example for this: Go should have gone even further in forcing style.)
If you think that "all code reads the same" is detrimental to developers, you are conflating the idea of developer (problem solver) to that of coder (keyboard typist.)
So, by adding a feature which works extremely well with OO and enhances the language they have no soul? That doesn't make any sense. Javas soul is being a blue collar language. It leaves the experiments to other (JVM) languages and takes the parts which have been shown in the field to be useful for many cases.
Go on the other hand is a half-finished Java, produced for the sake of saying "We are Google, OF COURSE we have our own language".
One package is written in the "new" functional style, another is written in "old" object oriented style, other parts use classes for nothing more than name spaces to house static methods. The reality is it's already a mess.
But isn't that just an inevitable outcome of aging? The only way to never age is dying young.
And practical use of Java had stopped being textbook OOP (which means using classes to model the world and putting your logic where the data is) long before the streams API etc came along. Actually the shift away from textbook OOP integration between logic and data already started when the beans pattern drowned us in getters and setters, which already happened when Java generics were still the Pizza language sitting as a draft on Odersky's desk. I even suspect that lack of generics was a confounding factor in that shift, because when you look at a pre-generics codebase (which I happened to do just yesterday) you will find that the brave men and women back then spent an enormous amount of boilerplate just for hiding untyped collections behind typed facades which is a form of using OOP features (meant for modeling the world) for program structure, which is basically what post-textbook-OOP Java is all about.
A design philosophy. Some sort of measurable practice that influences design. This is not limited to Java. Design by committee has been destroying the maintainability of many languages.
Streams are inspired by some idioms of functional programming. But they are not functional, and they cannot be made to be functional, because it is impossible to evaluate one without causing a rather glaring side effect.
I want expert code to be concise and uncluttered. When everything reads like a novice wrote it, that's a problem.