Auto VS Guava

I like to use AutoService to make using Java's ServiceLoader easier.

I've also had great luck combining that with AutoValue to allow production vs test injections without the new Foo(thing, null, null, null, thing2, null, null) situation:

AutoValue has posted a new doc comparing itself to Java record classes. (Records were new in Java 16, or earlier with --enable-preview.)

That means I don't forget about fields (as can happen if you're just doing `person.setX()` all the time). It's easy to see what is what when reading it. I can delete fields I don't want to initialize at the time. Yes, maybe immutable objects are the One True Way, but C# lets me choose (I can label properties with an initializer `init` rather than a setter `set` and then they're immutable).

Kotlin offers stuff like this too because it's really useful toward creating code that's easy to create and maintain. Go also lets you initialize structs in a similar fashion.

Java has come back to us a decade or more late with records. They're not bad, but they're only offering one thing. They don't cover what C#, Kotlin, Go, and other languages have offered for so long.

The annoying thing about Java is that it doesn't feel pragmatic a lot of the time. It feels like the language hates stealing ideas from others. It's Java: people steal ideas from Java, not the other way around. People do crazy things just to get POJOs including Immutables (http://immutables.github.io), AutoValue (https://github.com/google/auto/), Lombok (https://projectlombok.org), Joda Beans (https://www.joda.org/joda-beans/), and maybe more. They generate lots of code at compile time or do funky runtime stuff.

It just feels like Java misses the pragmatic stuff and still kinda doesn't want to handle that. I feel a bit silly harping on things like POJOs and setting data on a new object, but that's a big part of day-to-day stuff and it definitely pushes users away from Java towards languages that seem "better" simply because they don't have Java's oddly strong attachment to not offering simple value objects. Yes, again, records do something - but it feels like Java ignored how people are using Kotlin, Go, C#, and more and didn't go for something that would have been as widely applicable and pragmatic as it could have been.

Java has a lot of great stuff like great GCs (yes), lots of cool research, great performance, and Project Loom is really exciting. I just wish the language would lean a little more practical.

The main disadvantage of Java is the boilerplate and the fact that you don't get cool metaprogramming features. The boilerplate can be reduced with tools like AutoValue. The lack of monkey patching and crazy SFINAE template shenanigans is that it is much easier to look at some piece of code and know what it's calling. You have static types, so you can jump to the method definition reliably (as opposed to Python), and there aren't many subtle syntax features that can trip you up (like lvalue vs rvalue references in C++). You can absolutely make a mess of Java with crazy frameworks, but the fact that the language itself has simple syntax means that nobody else in the organization can do anything too clever.

There is no way you can tell that's valid Common Lisp without actually compiling and executing the code in the json-reader.lisp file. When the compiler gets to (enable-json-syntax), it sees that it is a macro so it executes its code at compile-time. That code then redefines the meaning of the { and [ characters to be the start of JSON objects/arrays (instead of their normal meaning in Common Lisp), and installs code telling Common Lisp how to parse JSON syntax, which is triggered when those characters are encountered in input. The example-object function shows an example of using it. Finally, (disable-json-syntax) is another macro, also executed at compile time, which undoes those changes to the Common Lisp syntax.

Common Lisp did not invent the idea of allowing a program to dynamically alter the language syntax as it was being parsed; I believe the idea was first introduced in Maclisp, and from there spread to other LISP dialects (such as Franz Lisp and Interlisp) before finally being standardised in Common Lisp. The originators of Scheme intentionally decided to leave this feature out, but some implementations/descendants of Scheme have added it back in, such as Racket [1], Guile [2], and Chicken Scheme [3]. Other Lisp-family languages (such as Clojure or Emacs Lisp) have resisted calls to add it, despite encouragement from certain quarters.

Earlier you spoke of "Tcl's lack of a grammar up against Scheme, Lisp", but if runtime-extensible syntax is a form of "lack of a grammar", then many Lisp family languages lack grammar too.

Another language for which this is true (albeit to a significantly lesser degree), is Java. With Java, you can run arbitrary code at compile time by defining an annotation processor. The annotation processor code is run when the annotation is encountered. The annotation processor is allowed to issue compilation errors. It can also generate more source code for additional classes, which gets added to the compilation process, and your program may refer some of those generated classes, and hence need that generated code to compile–for an example see [4] from the Google AutoValue docs, where the "AutoValue_Animal" class being constructed in the create() method is dynamically generated by a processor which is triggered by the @AutoValue annotation. So, if your Java program contains annotations with an associated processor, and if you define "syntactically correct" as "compiles without any errors", then you can't know if the Java program is syntactically correct without executing arbitrary Java code.

[0] https://gist.github.com/chaitanyagupta/9324402

[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/Reader_Extension.html

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Reader-E...

[3] https://wiki.call-cc.org/man/5/Module%20(chicken%20read-synt...

[4] https://github.com/google/auto/blob/master/value/userguide/i...

Reminds me of Google’s AutoValue: https://github.com/google/auto/tree/master/value

Records where you can, and because Lombok is controversial, Immutables is the other alternative (or autovalue). Actually, all code generation tools are fantastic: Immutables, MapStruct, jOOQ...

Via Lombok, yes, which, as of now, is a default plugin in Idea, which everyone is using anyway. If you don't like Lombok particularly (and god knows, I can't imagine why), there is an alternative made by Google called Auto. Or you can use Scala, which has some features like that natively and is 100% interoperable with Java (meaning you can make a new Scala file within the current project and start using it right away). I imagine Kotlin also has some syntax sugar; however, I am not familiar with Kotlin very well.

For immutable value types, AutoValue[1] is a nice library for automating this. Lombok[2] is also popular, but a lot of orgs avoid it because it has some pretty deep dependencies on implementation details of the JDK that aren't guaranteed to be stable across releases. It seems well-maintained in practice, thoguh. Once Java records[3] are out of preview, they will probably be the preferred approach, but it will be a while before most teams are on a version of the JDK that supports them.

For mutable objects, the notion of equality is hairy in general, because what you want often depends on why you'd be comparing the two objects. You might have two mutable objects that can be meaningfully compared in your business logic, but absolutely should not be used as keys in a map. Often you can satisfy your goals by implementing a separate method that does not attempt to conform to the 'equals' contract, which ensures it will not unintentionally be used for e.g. data structure ordering.

[1] https://github.com/google/auto/blob/master/value/userguide/i...

[2] https://projectlombok.org/features/EqualsAndHashCode

[3] https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/records-come-to-java

The first problem is at the level of Type System, given that a situation more correct would allow us to distinguish through the Collection Type which abstraction we are operating with, species if definable as mutable or immutable. The JCF was born at a time when great care was taken to offer immediate operational data structures, and with attention to performance, but with less attention to constructs or uses that are now seen as common. These concepts have been taken up by other infrastructures from which we certainly cannot fail to mention: Eclipse Collection, Guava Collections, and VAVR.

Even better is getting Gradle/Maven to correctly pull "plain" vs "Android" versions of the package instead of them just publishing the diverging code base as two repository packages.

https://github.com/google/guava/issues/2914

I'll admit I'm surprised to see that BOMs have been documented on maven.apache.org since mid-2008. It looks like Spring, for example, didn't adopt them until mid-2014. I don't know how widely they caught on in other areas. The first discussion of them in the context of Guava may have been in 2018, as I don't see mention of them in the various issues from 2011-2015 (#605, #1329, #1471, #1954.

And a quick peek at the source code for ImmutableList seems to confirm this (https://github.com/google/guava/blob/master/guava/src/com/google/common/collect/ImmutableList.java - it goes via a bunch of methods, but ends up using Arrays.copyOf(), which creates a fixed-size array).

The guava library of Java has some of these data structures implemented: https://github.com/google/guava/wiki/ImmutableCollectionsExplained , but implementations of the above book in many languages can be found on github (say, this one for Haskell: https://github.com/aistrate/Okasaki )

Java Mask: Java Mask is a library that offers various string masking techniques for sensitive data such as credit card numbers, email addresses, and more. You can find the library at: https://github.com/miguelfreitas93/java-mask DataMasker: DataMasker is a Java library specifically designed for masking sensitive data, including credit card numbers, using customizable masking patterns. Visit the GitHub repository for more information and usage examples: https://github.com/GDSSecurity/DataMasker Maskify: Maskify is a simple Java library that can be used to mask credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, and other sensitive information. You can find the library at: https://github.com/jonathancarvalhoalves/maskify CreditCardUtils: This is a lightweight Java library that provides utility methods for validating, formatting, and masking credit card numbers. Visit the GitHub repository for more information: https://github.com/malkusch/creditcardutils Google Guava: Google Guava is a popular set of Java libraries containing a wealth of utilities for working with strings, collections, and more. While not specifically designed for masking credit card information, you can use Guava's string manipulation methods to mask sensitive data: https://github.com/google/guava

I mean, I guess, technically? If you define it like that, then Microsoft has people working for them for free, as does Google, as does Apple, etc. It's not that weird, and you can try to twist it to be weird, but those of us in the software industry largely regard this as a good thing.

So we have https://github.com/google/guava/issues/4011

Ok, so let's implement our lazy initialization more smartly to avoid acquiring the lock every time and use old fashion but still working double-checked locking. I've found it implemented by Suppliers.memoize in guava library.