Functional Programming: A PragPub Anthology

Comfort Break

We’re certainly not there yet, and we—everyone—have plenty more to explore first. Always reflect on what you’d like in a language rather than sticking to what existing languages give you and soldiering on. Thinking about type systems is part of this.

Here’s a relevant and poignant example from Java. If you’ve used Java, you might have needed the .clone() method a few times. Recall how it gets used, though—typically like this:

Foo orig = Foo.new();
Foo copy = (Foo) orig.clone();

Why is that cast needed on the second line? Is it just because that’s the Java way and you’ve gotten used to it? Or does it point to a weakness in the language? It is rather annoying to have to write down information that is very obvious to the programmer, ...