[quilombodigital]

My problem is with the "just adds"... Scala made this mistake, and ended with many different ways to do the same task. It is a powerful language, but I believe languages must have only one (or two) concise way to to things.

[halfmatthalfcat]

The "multiple ways of doing things" is a feature, not a bug and something which lives in almost every programming language. It's become a meme at this point and a lazy argument against a language.

[metadat]

> It's become a meme at this point and a lazy argument against a language.

This might be a casual dismissal of what is in fact a nuanced aspect of programming languages.

Multiple ways of doing the same thing can make the language less accessible because it becomes confusing to reason about what the "right" way is.

That said, this particular addition merely reduces repetitive toil, and it follows similar existing Java conventions, for example see the Java-7 equivalent of Python "with-statements".

https://stackoverflow.com/a/35116251

[quilombodigital]

yep, agree with you. I become more aware of this when I worked some years in a huge ruby project. Everything was allowed, and with tons of DSLs you dont know anymore what is happening.

[Banana699]

This is obviously false in full generality, C++ has many (M A N Y) ways to do anything, and I have never seen even the most fanatic C++ fans defend this as a good thing. Nearly every single C++ dev hates some (large) subset of the language, which subset is another matter entirely, but a subset nonetheless.

Bjarne Stroustrup once noted in Design & Evolution of C++ that people want different things from the seemingly simple artifacts we call "Programming Languages". Some people want an algorithmic language to express procedures cleanly in, others want a design language to express large scale systems in. Some want a terse and uniform "executable mathematics" notation, others want a down-to-earth worse-is-better lets-make-some-goddamn-apps-and-put-some-fucking-bread-on-the-table working class language. Some want a language with an emphasis on the lone author, others an emphasis on the corporate business team. A language as a tool that you wield skillfully for the single purpose it was built for, a language as a toolbox full of gadgets, a language as a material to build the previous two from, a language as a community hub to organize around, etc etc etc. I have seen people argue that "Language" the wrong metaphor to understand computer notations entirely.

This is why you can't say anything general about programming languages.

[adra]

If you wanted the idiomatic only-one-way-to-do-things approach to do things, Java is not and has never been the language of choice for that. Why do we have 10 different dependency injection /logging / web frameworks? Who cares! Let's add an 11th for good measure. I don't want java to be idiomatic and purist conformant tedium.

You're welcome to switch your language of choice to go if that's really your bag.

[quilombodigital]

The examples you gave are not language features, are frameworks/libraries... not the discussion. (the only exception I can see is the "logging API", but this is debatable)

[wiseowise]

> but I believe languages must have only one (or two) concise way to to things.

Java has none.

[quilombodigital]

I humbly accept the critic. :)