There's been talk of renaming our collection classes, because while they serve technical value, they might cause confusion and frustration when used in conjunction with the JDK collections in a large Java application. This thread will serve as the place to brainstorm on what we could call them. Note that many of the classes in the collections package aren't really under scrutiny here, so let's start tightly focused on the really big and tough ones:
ArrayList HashMap LinkedList If changing the package name is not enough, then we have to come up with different names for these classes. And yet their names hark back to the early days of computer science - way before the JDK. One suggestion is to prepend "P" or "Pivot" on to them, but at least to me, that seems like a cop-out. Thus far, we've done a pretty good job avoiding words like "Generic", "Default", "Abstract" as prepends to class names, as they tend to not provide much value. The same goes for adding the package name in the class name (com.foo.FooMap). Also, if we did this, then consistency would seem to say that we should do the same for all classes in the package (PivotEnumSet - yuck!). So where does that leave us? It seems that in their current form, the fact that we created our own collections will be a constant source of friction to our users and newbies, but (a) they do provide real technical value, and (b) they're not easy to rename cleanly. Thoughts? -T
