Reason 20X6 Why Java Sucks: Discourages Laziness

(A pronunciation guide for 20X6, for the uninformed).

Right, so I was writing a few test cases for my Graphical User Interfaces assignment and I banged my head against Java AGAIN (quite nautrally, I might add, I wasn't trying to be dynamic, it just happened).

The first moment occurred when I was looking through the JUnit Assertions for something that would let me test whether an exception was thrown or not. I didn't see anything right off the bat, so I chalked it up to laziness and went to write one myself. I typed in the method name when I realized "Ahhhh yes, no closures... oh and no easy way to invoke a method dynamically. Poop." Oh well.

The next time was when I saw that I'd be writing a couple of assertions repeatedly with minor variations depending upon the attribute I was vetting. No reason to repeat myself, right? Wrong. Once again, the lack of easy dynamic method invocation bites my ass (it also bites ass).

Heck, for that matter, if Java had decent introspection facilities, I could've probablly just written one special assertion and done all the attribute tests in one fell helper method.

Now, if you're reading this, please note that I'm not saying these things are impossible, just that the path of least resistance is to not use them, but rather write more, repetitive code.

When a language enables laziness to create better code, better code WILL be created. Every Programmer wants to do the right thing, they just don't want to work at it, and there's no good reason that they should have to.