[eastbound]

It all failed when .stream() appeared. Why make people use .stream() for functional programming, plus streams aren’t even reusable, I almost wish they invented a new operator based on an exotic UTF-8 character than those 9 extra characters. Fonts should have a ligature for .stream().

And now let’s talk about .collect(toList())…

And records which look like ugly beans…

Java is the land of the verbose. But it can probably be solved with 9 extra characters on every line.

[lenkite]

Nobody complains about the Rust turbo-fish operator which is pretty verbose too. Java has already has introduced a direct toList()/toArray() anyways.

    let v = (1..5).collect::<Vec<i32>>(); // Cool Rust

[eastbound]

Streams should be built in collections, not a .stream().map(…).toList() convolution. In know its incompatible with weird frameworks who already overloaded the .map() method, but well… let them recompile.

That was in 2008, we’d be happy by now; and Java had no qualms asking everyone to change the package names from javax’ to jakartax’ in Java 21, so they should have issued a java.collections package and deprecated the lists i java.utils.

[jmaker]

If v’s type can be inferred, you don’t need to give that extra hint to the type checker, likewise for 1..5. And Java Streams’ toList produces an immutable list.

[redditor98654]

One benefit is that it makes these operations lazy. There are no intermediate lists created when you call a map on a stream. If map were a method in a list, it would need to return a new list. And if you have multiple such maps etc, it would create more such lists for each map invocation.

[erkkonet]

starting with JDK 16, Stream has .toList() that will save you ten characters for the .collect()

[never_inline]

It's very difficult for a language designer to satisify the aesthetes.