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Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it really would be helpful if the method name made that clear.

The language documentation does make it clear what toString() is for. And it's convenient to be able to (for example) stick objects and strings together with the "+" operator and have conversions automatically happen.

But (understandably) not everyone reads the language documentation cover to cover before they start writing Java code, so you can't count on that making it obvious.

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java.lang.Object has a few methods though. At least those should be known when one starts writing productive code. Otherwise one produces even worse bugs than relying on toString behavior (equals and hashCode, god forbid).

Cover to cover would mean understanding the memory model and maybe garbage collection. That's too far certainly but a few basics would do no harm. toString is surely one of them.

I'd hazard a guess that 0.1% of Java developers are aware that on some operating systems Object.wait() can awaken spuriously. Heck, it wasn't even in the Javadoc until 1.5. And don't even get me started on how you should handle an InterruptedException.

Most Java developers I know consider rolling your own multi-threading scheme about as wise as rolling your own cryptography, and just pretend notify/notifyAll/wait don't even exist.

Ironically, that's one of the few things I do know off the top of my head about Object.wait(). I'm far from an expert on Object's threading methods, but "this will burn you, don't try it" is becoming more pervasive than "here's how to do this". Which is almost certainly the right order to learn those things in.

Most Java developers don't know what to do when something can throw InterruptedException. I'd argue that bugs caused by broken code that catches this exception are much worse than what can happen when not using toString() correctly.

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