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Lombok makes Java cool again

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Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#11

Post by cs02rm0 »

platelminto wrote: post #6

I'm interested in the downsides of using Lombok, since the article seems to only focus on its positives and makes it seem like I should download it and start using it right now. Is there anyone here with Lombok experience that wants to share any issues they've run into while using it? All I can think of right now is the fact that the source code isn't compatible with Java.

The downside is that you'll need to install it into your IDE. And again when you upgrade it. I guess the version needs to loosely match the one your projects use too. That might not sound like a lot but some colleagues hate that overhead.

I love it though, think I've been using it for at least 8 years now in just about every Java project.

Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#12

Post by mohaine »

My main issue with Java is all the annotation based programming. Some of these are nice and can make the easy case super easy but if you need go even slightly off the easy path you seem to quickly loose all the time gained on the easy path.

i.e.

@GET(url="http://host/users/$userid") public abstract User getUser(String userid)

isn't that much easier than the python requests version but much harder if you need to add a custom dynamic header to the call.

Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#13

Post by javagram »

benbenolson wrote: post #8

One of the major features of a language is its syntax-- and here, it seems as if the author, instead of simply using another language, is "fixing" Java's verbosity by installing a compiler pass that converts "shorthand" Java into valid Java code. Why wouldn't the author just use another language?

Using Lombok is relatively simple compared to switching to Kotlin or Scala, I think.

A few annotations don’t seem that much more radical than stuff like AspectJ.

Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#14

Post by chooseaname »

Java the language is cool. What the enterprise has done with it is not cool. Writing apps with layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of abstraction is ... self defeating. Then they'll holler, we need to rewrite it! All in the name of finding that one true architecture that can handle any business CR. Blech.

Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#15

Post by esrauch »

benbenolson wrote: post #8

One of the major features of a language is its syntax-- and here, it seems as if the author, instead of simply using another language, is "fixing" Java's verbosity by installing a compiler pass that converts "shorthand" Java into valid Java code. Why wouldn't the author just use another language?

Sometimes just fixing the rough edges with syntactic sugar can provide a lot of value. Like, CoffeeScript got pretty far with that strategy.

Honestly, a lot of the best TypeScript features could be described the way you describe it.

Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#16

Post by jkmcf »

Somewhat serious: LombokScript please.

To quote @Retra in this thread: "I feel it is important for writing code to be fun". IMO, programming is fun when you are solving "business" problems, not writing boilerplate or handling a language's myriad edge cases.

Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#17

Post by twblalock »

platelminto wrote: post #6

I'm interested in the downsides of using Lombok, since the article seems to only focus on its positives and makes it seem like I should download it and start using it right now. Is there anyone here with Lombok experience that wants to share any issues they've run into while using it? All I can think of right now is the fact that the source code isn't compatible with Java.

The @Builder annotation has some odd behavior if you want to add default values (it just hardcodes them and you cannot override them!) or extra builder methods.

Actually, anything involving default values seems to be very brittle and difficult to work with -- especially when deserializing objects from JSON.

The @Wither annotation results in methods that do not always make a copy, and sometimes use == instead of .equals when comparing class members. If you call one of the Wither methods and assume you have a copy of the original object, and then you modify that "copy", you might have just created a very subtle bug.

If you are using IntelliJ you can use the Refactor > Delombok menu option to show you the code that Lombok generates. I've been told that does not actually invoke the same code that the annotation processor invokes at compile time, so the results of Delombok might be misleading.

Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#18

Post by twblalock »

LeanderK wrote: post #2

I think java made some wrong decision, with bigggest one being very pragmatics generics-addition, resulting in trouble down the road like List not being possible. But I don't think checked exceptions are one of them ;) I don't like too much flexibility in a language that has strong types. If you undermine the type-system, why not code in python? But some additions of Lombok seem worthwile.

The problem with checked exceptions is that any method can throw runtime exceptions, whether it declares checked exceptions or not. So the presence or absence of "throws" does not really change your approach to error handling. An exception might happen either way, so you need to exercise the same level of care either way.

Furthermore, checked exceptions force you to bubble up implementation details all the way up to the interfaces. For example, if any implementation of an interface might throw IOException, you need to put that in the method signature in the interface. You can be clever and wrap it in a custom exception that exposes the same level of abstraction as the interface, but that's not a whole lot better than just using RuntimeException, and it causes people to try to cast the exception cause.

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