Re: The pain of autoboxing (Was: Is there a limit to the size or complexity of JPanel's paintComponent method?)

Daniele Futtorovic wrote:


There, there. Actually, I sympathize.

There is no need for you to talk about it. Sometimes things are just too
painful to discuss. Maybe someday when you can face your feelings more fully
you can master autoboxing and gain what utility it does offer.

I just only expect autoboxing to be what it is. If it doesn't behave the way
I expect, I review the rules and correct my mistake. In places where it's
inconvenient, I don't use it, just like I don't use reflection in places where
it's inconvenient or wrong. Why waste time wishing for it to be what it is not?

For the most part, explicit conversion between primitives and their wrappers
is better quality engineering and better code documentation than autoboxing
provides. Autoboxing was a sop to the whiners who thought overt primitive
wrapping was "too much code", instead of being the statement of intent it
should be. It's an idiom for code writers, not code maintainers.

Programming is hard.

--
Lew