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
