On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 7:18 PM, Fabrizio Giudici <[email protected]> wrote: > But the previous examples referring to tons of popular Java libraries are > pretty clear to demonstrate that well designed libraries can be reused. > Given that we're basically talking of the Java ecosystem, which I think most > people acknowledge is one of the biggest in the world when compared to other > languages, I think that the conclusion that Java does pretty good code reuse > in comparison to other languages is evident.
To be fair, a lot of those libraries cited as examples are duplicates of each other. I make no claims that this is a good or a bad thing, but it was just recently when it was mentioned that Guava can replace a lot of apache commons libraries. Libraries that, as far as I know, do not actually have any bugs. They just haven't been updated in a while. Even when items are not full on duplicates of each other, how many libraries have a primitive hashtable to avoid boxing? (The jgit author specifically mentions having written one.) And this may have been the author's point. The core library has favored deprecation to code reuse to a large extent. Hashtable versus HashMap is an easy example. This is ignoring such new collections as ArrayDeque. Then there is the increasing size of imports necessary to use core collections. Static factory methods help a lot with this, but were not used by core apis. (I'm specifically thinking about collections here. Seems having Collections.list(a, b, c, d) would have given an easy way to shield folks from even importing ArrayList, but still getting it most of the time.) As I said, overall article is still flame bait, far as I can tell. Just not sure I understand some of the rebuttals as being actual rebuttals. Just loud proclamations of dissent. I should also add that I favor Knuth's view on code reuse as a whole. So, still not sure I understand the code reuse arguments. Pro or con, at this point. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
