auto

ike int), etc. In some ways, Java has caught up - and C# lost a lot of time being constrained to the Microsoft ecosystem. However, in other ways it hasn't. I just want a POJO: frankly, this has been a problem that Java hasn't solved and it's been well over a decade where everyone has known it's a problem. No, records don't solve it. In Kotlin, I can make a data class and it's easy. In Scala, I think they're case classes. In C# I have properties where I can say: `class Person { string Name { get; set; } }`. I can see that it's just a boring property without having to look at method bodies. If there's something special, that get or set can have a body to do stuff and it becomes really clear that it's something special. Getters and setters are a wonderful way to set traps for others on your team or for yourself a year later because you look at a class with 15 items and it's going to have 90 lines of getters/setters + another 30 lines of an empty line between each method. You look and just decide "yea, I'm sure this doesn't have special behavior" and go about your business just to get bitten later. I want to be able to instantiate data easily: With Java, I can do `var person = new Person(); person.setName("Johnny");`, but that becomes pretty tedious and error-prone when instantiating a large object. With records you have a constructor, but then you're dealing with positional arguments and it's hard to understand. When reading the code, you don't necessarily know what each of the inputs means. Maybe your IDE puts the argument names in. When filling it out, I've found IDEs to only be somewhat helpful. With C#, I can do `new Person { }` and then hit the suggestion key combo inside the brackets in my IDE and it'll offer to fill out all the properties so that I get something like: new Person { Name = "", Age = 0, Address = "" } 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.

example-object () { "someArray": [1, 2, 3], "someBoolean": true, "someNull": null, "nestedObject": { "type": "example" } }) (disable-json-syntax) 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 designers 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 to some of those generated classes, and hence need that generated code to successfully 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...

at 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

th different opinions, and language doesn't enforce a single way to define construct these kind of byte-code mangling ideas fall apart. I've personally people complain about Lombok and they hate it every bit. Doing these constructs at language level removes debate, and unifies how people in larger community. I hope newer versions of Java move fast enough to make something simple like `@Cleanup` a thing of past. I will highly encourage everyone to try Kotlin too; it's almost transparent drop-in with better syntax.

you end up with a XML preprocessing pass that writes Java code (XDoclet). 2001 called and wants it example back :) . Yes APT didn't exist for a while. Tangental but XDoclet sort of reminds me of Go's very weak annotation system. And again It takes time to get a macro/preprocessing engine right particularly for typed languages. e.g. Rust has had some fair challenges getting this right and even their macro system is not completely hygenic IIRC. [1]: https://github.com/google/auto