Top Most The problem with Java Primitives

As a long time Java user I have developed a love for the language.

At least until I found Groovy. Let me explain...

Smalltalk enjoyed a surge of popularity in the early 1990's when the "deep thinkers" of the industry proclaimed OO as the next big thing. However Smalltalk got stuck with a reputation of being "too slow".

When Java was designed in the mid 1990's it utilized primitives like int, char, float, etc. for performance. But if you think about it, here we have a mostly object-orientated language, where all comparison operators (>, <, ==, etc.) make sense with primitives, not objects!

Groovy designers, on the other hand, realized compiler technology and modern hardware utilize objects with excellent performance. However that leads to a quandary: how do we include operators in a way that makes sense?

The answer is operator overloading. But isn't operator overloading a bad thing? Didn't we learn that from C++?

Well, operator overloading can certainly be abused, but it is a natural way to allow operators to work in a fully object-orientated language.

Examine the following Groovy code:

public Boolean max(Integer i1, Integer i1) {
(i1 > i2)? i1 : i2
}

Even though i1 and i2 are objects of type Integer, this code works as expected. Why? Groovy overloads the '>' operator to call the compareTo() method. For integers, this works since Groovy has added the compareTo method to make Integers work as expected.

You see this all over the Groovy language. Instead of having to memorize Java's idiosynchronicies, Groovy works in an intuitive manner. Much like the Unix's RLS (Rule of Least Surprise), Groovy does what you expect.

Now take what is agruably the most common Java bug: comparing two String objects with '=='. Not only does it compile cleanly but it fails intermittenly, which is the hardest type of failure to cure. Yet it looks fine, passes code reviews, and makes it to production systems all too often. Even experienced Java developers miss it.

In Groovy, it just works. Groovy calls equals() when you use the '==' syntax. So now we have a language that not only is backward compatible with Java, but fixes common Java bugs!

All I can say is "Groovy".