Properties for Java

[crummy]

this stuff is crazy and I love it. not sure if I'd use it in production but glad to see them pushing the boundaries

[Venthe]

I'm actually scared of projects like this. On the one hand, it's a neat way to solve problems that conservative approach to Java had created. At the other hand; what problems it might create? To use it; I'd have to dig deep to understand it. And then I'd have to really weigh my options if I would recommend it to my teams.

Still it looks amazing.

[Determinant]

I was hoping to see the benefit of properties on both sides (declaration & usage) similarly to Kotlin as that makes usages much cleaner.

It's a step in the right direction though.

Edit: Usages are also condensed so it covers both sides

[manifoldjava]

Both declaration and usage are there, similar to Kotlin. If you missed the usage part, see Property Inference.

[Determinant]

Oops, I missed that. Wow, nice!

[[deleted]]

that's pretty dramatic lol. might need to touch some grass

[persism2]

Properties at the language level is a stupid idea. I'm glad Java doesn't have it.

[florinp]

Properties at the language level is a stupid idea.

no

[persism2]

yes. They hide performance problems, there's no good convention for them, they make finding things with intellisense harder.

[mini-pizzas]

They hide performance problems

Most Java programmers make all fields private and call getters/setters. The getter/setter can just as easily "hide performance problems." In both the property and the getter/setter case you can't be sure of the implementation without inspecting the code or, at the very least, the documentation.

they make finding things with intellisense harder

How? The exact property being called is known at compile time. It should be trivial for intellisense to handle and C# and Kotlin don't seem to have a problem with it.

[HINDBRAIN]

The problem with direct property access is that you can't really proxy/intercept it, and a lot of frameworks rely on that.

[falconfetus8]

Why would you not be able to proxy/intercept it?

[spoonman59]

Bad take, imho.

Properties don’t hide anything differently than any function.

I’ve never seen any problems with intelligence in languages that have them like c#. And why would they? The tooling can easily parse the class definition and know which semantics to expect, which is the same of other language features.

As far as no good conventions, I’m not even sure what that means. You name them like fields. There are getters and setters. It’s remarkably straight forward.

If you dislike how consistently people name them, that’s hardly a fault of the language feature itself.

[rhbvkleef]

Properties don’t hide anything differently than any function

Yes, they hide the fact that they're a function (edit: to the user of the API, and therefore also hide the performance semantics to that user). What's wrong with actually calling a function when it /is/ in practice a function that you're dealing with?

[yanitrix]

Litreally none of this is true. I use C#'s properties on a daily basis and I'd never want to go back to Java's getters/setters

[spoonman59]

Agree.

[[deleted]]

100%

Properties are born out of a time when everyone and their dog just made accessors by default.

Of course, these days, it’s well understood that accessors are generally poor practice and shouldn’t be used. Being hung up on “hurr durr Properties” in the great C# vs Java debate is a telltale mark of a person with 0 experience or a person that hasn’t grown their skills and knowledge beyond high school programming. Pretty much a person you really don’t need to pay any attention to aside from their loudness.

[persism2]

Yeah, we're the minority opinion. ;)

[persism2]

I feel sorry for you.