This makes me wonder why most of us use Java at all. In your typical web app project, classes just feel like either:
1) Data structures. This I suspect is a result of ORM's not really being ORM's but actually "Structural Relational Mappers".
- or -
2) Namespaces to dump functions. These are your run-of-the-mill "utils" classes or "service" classes, etc.
The more I work in Java, the more I feel friction between the language, its identity(OO beginning to incorporate functional ideas), and how people write in it.
Java was the first popular language to push static analysis for correctness. It was the "if it compiles, it runs" language of its day, what meant that managers could hire a couple of bad developers by mistake and it wouldn't destroy the entire team's productivity.
I'm not sure that position lasted for even 5 years. But it had a very unique and relevant value proposition at the time.
But Java has better marketing.
It got really useful by 1998.
By that time it supported parametric generics, multiple inheritance, named parameters, optionals instead of nulls everywhere, compile to machine code and quite a few extra things that I couldn't understand at the time.
This is so incredibly wrong it must be a troll.
You can declare static methods on interfaces in Java, which means you could call things like Users.create("Foobar") if you wanted to.
OO conflates many different aspects that are often orthogonal but have been conflated together opportunistically rather than by sound rigor. Clearly most languages allow for functions outside classes. It's clearly the case today especially with FP gaining momentum, but it's also clear back then when Java and the JVM were created. I think smalltalk was the only other language that had this limitation.
Like others in this thread, I can only recommend the big OOPS video: https://youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI
Users.create(...) is the easy case. Try transfer_permissions(user1, user2, entity) while retaining transactionality and the ability of either user to cancel the transfer.
I'm not sure why having a global function by the same would make this any easier or harder to implement. But it would pollute the global namespace with highly specific operations.
I mean it makes sense to group "like" things together. Whether that's in a module, a class, an interface, or a namespace. Having a huge number of things globally is just confusing pollution.
Yes, but going as a static method into a class that goes into a module is overkill vs just putting it in the module.
> Having a huge number of things globally is just confusing pollution.
I don't know what language you use, but modern programming languages allow specifying what to import when importing a module. You don't have to import everything from every module.
You don't need an ORM or an overgrown dependency injection framework to create a webapp in Java.
The separation of functions and records..
Java has had "data carriers" in the form of records for a while now. Immutable(ish), low boilerblate, convenient.
record User(String name){}
I dislike the term "anemic domain model", it casts a value judgment which I think is unwarranted. There's a spectrum from anemic to obese (for want of a better word). There are tradeoffs all along that spectrum. Finding a sweet spot will depend heavily on what you're doing, why you're doing it, what your team is comfortable with etc.