[fpc-pascal] Food for thought - language string improvement

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Mon, 10 Jul 2017, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

> Hi,
>
>
> Purely on the language side of things.... I love the fact that there is 
> no *.h or an "interface section" in my code - why must C/C++ and Object 
> Pascal duplicate that information. If I want to see a purely "interface" 
> view of my code, the IDE doesn't that as standard in the unit Outline 
> window.

If that is all, on the language side, I am a happy man :)

I think Java is a rather primitive language, 
so I had hoped for something massively impressive.

Let me give you a counter example why I think Java plainly sucks.

I get very depressed when I see things like this:

dstream.foreachRDD(new VoidFunction<JavaRDD<String>>() {
   @Override
   public void call(JavaRDD<String> rdd) {
     rdd.foreachPartition(new VoidFunction<Iterator<String>>() {
       @Override
       public void call(Iterator<String> partitionOfRecords) {
         Connection connection = ConnectionPool.getConnection();
         while (partitionOfRecords.hasNext()) {
           connection.send(partitionOfRecords.next());
         }
         ConnectionPool.returnConnection(connection);
       }
     });
   }
});

Such code is completely unreadable to me.

Compare this to the same code in Python:

def sendPartition(iter):
     connection = ConnectionPool.getConnection()
     for record in iter:
         connection.send(record)
     ConnectionPool.returnConnection(connection)

dstream.foreachRDD(lambda rdd: rdd.foreachPartition(sendPartition))

The very paragon of readability.

Or Scala:

dstream.foreachRDD { rdd =>
   rdd.foreachPartition { partitionOfRecords =>
     val connection = ConnectionPool.getConnection()
     partitionOfRecords.foreach(record => connection.send(record))
     ConnectionPool.returnConnection(connection)
   }
}

Infinitely more readable than Java in my opinion. 
And that is what matters to me.

The Java version with all it's templates is just painful.

(And mainly the reason why I think common use of Generics or templates 
is just a plain wrong approach, but that is another story)

So in fact your mail is a relief, I thought there would be some killer
arguments why Java is better than Object Pascal...

About the IDE: there I cannot argue, there are probably many more things
that can be done in Lazarus.

Michael.