[jfengel]

Java is deliberately nudging you not to do things like that. It would rather you create a class with fields a and b -- which has its own verbosity, though they've improved it.

I find that I use structures like that primarily when interfacing with other loosely-typed languages, like Javascript, which do encourage you to create structures on the fly like that. Impedance mismatch is always a pain, no matter where it occurs.

That's not to say Java doesn't want you to use Maps. They do -- but only when the content is dynamic. They don't want to add literals for it because that's the opposite of their goal.

There are days when you want it anyway, and then you grumble that the language has forced you to do something ugly. But every language is a set of tradeoffs where some things are ugly, other things are pretty, and the language spec doesn't require a shelf of its own.

[ahtihn]

Unit tests very frequently need Map declarations like that.

[jfengel]

Unit tests are exactly one of those situations I had in mind. Unit tests are always kind of painful that way: you need to construct things by hand, using interfaces that were designed for automated use.

The same fact is what makes unit tests so brittle. Ideally, you do as little of that as possible: you less fake stuff you make, the more robust the test will be.

There are days you can't, and that sucks. But the language is giving you a nudge in the direction of how to do that, by making it easier to construct actual POJOs than unstructured intermediate data.