Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I work with Java in my day job; it's by no means my favorite language, but I can be quite productive in it.

I haven't kept a tally of my frustrations with Java, but I can assure you that the most frequent is its lack of first-class sum types. Every time I need to encode (encode!) such a basic concept as "it could be this or that" using subclasses and some Design Pattern to Manage the Variants (usually Visitor, sometimes State), I metaphorically weep for my soul.

There are plenty of other minor gripes I have with the language -- there have been multiple instances where generic generics (HKTs, `class Foo<F<_>>`) would have made things much clearer -- but sum types are certainly the most prominent.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: