97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know

Chapter 42. Java Should Feel Fun

Holly Cummins

I started my Java career using J2EE 1.2. I had questions. Why were there four classes and hundreds of lines of generated code for each bean? Why did compiling tiny projects take half an hour? It wasn’t productive, and it wasn’t fun. Those two often go together: things feel un-fun because we know they’re waste. Think about meetings where nothing is decided, status reports no one reads…

If un-fun is bad, what is fun? Is it good? And how do we get it? Fun can have different faces:

• Exploration (focused investigation)

• Play (for its own sake, no goal)

• Puzzles (rules and a goal)

• Games (rules and a winner)

• Work (a satisfying goal)

Java allows all of these—the work part is obvious, and anyone who’s debugged a Java program knows about the puzzle part. (Debugging isn’t necessarily fun, but finding the solution is great.) We learn through exploration (when we’re new to something) and play (when we know enough to do stuff).

Leaving aside the fun we can have with it, is Java inherently fun? Java is verbose compared to younger languages. Boilerplate isn’t fun, but some of it is fixable. For example, Lombok neatly generates getters and setters, as well as hashCode and equals methods (tedious and error-prone otherwise). Manually writing entry and exit trace is un-fun, but aspects or tracing libraries can instrument dynamically (and massively ...