2009/11/16 Stephen Colebourne <scolebou...@joda.org>: > 2009/11/16 David Holmes - Sun Microsystems <david.hol...@sun.com>: >>> In this specific case, the question was "why include it when you can >>> use a?b:c". Well, I've seen resistance by developers to that language >>> feature, and I know some places outright block it in coding standards. >>> For many, a method call is preferred, and "overhead" isn't what >>> matters. >> >> I find such a mentality to programming to be utterly incomprehensible. Who >> are these people? And what motivates them? >> >> I say let these people define their own libraries to support their >> pathologies - don't lumber it on the rest of the general population of >> programmers. > > This is where things can get very heated, so please take this as just > my take on what I see. > > The community that defines Java - Sun, Google, Open Source, Bloggers - > are, in general, the experts and gurus in the field. Most people > reading this list have no problem with the ternary statement. Most of > us realise that null avoidance is better than null-handling. However, > we are, by far, the *minority* of Java developers, not the majority. > > My call is not to let the majority rule, but to understand that the > quality code and standards of Sun/Google/SiliconValley are far, far > rarer everywhere else. Sometimes as leaders it is necessary to accept > that not everyone is going to do things the 'right' way, and sometimes > it is better to help mitigate the 'wrong' way (hence Elvis and > friends). In other words, what do you do when telling people to do the > right thing fails? > > As I say, this is as much about opinion and what you have experienced > as hard facts. For example, I know that nulls and null-handling is > everywhere in the codebase I work on, and I don't consider that to be > especially wrong or broken, nor do my colleagues. > > BTW, for the future I'd remind everyone of Fan - http://fandev.org - > where all variable references are non-null by default, something which > we should all support. > > Stephen >
I agree with Stephen. In real word you have to deal with "pathologies" which are made by others. When you deal with muck you need pitchfork not a white gloves. I discuses a lot about Elvis null-safe operator and conclusion was always same: Java without it is better, but there is a lot of cases when we need it to deal with crappy code. -- Regards. Lasu aka Marek Kozieł
