Lombok Is Still Relevant in the Age of Java Records

Lombok Is Still Relevant in the Age of Java Records(swaranga.dev)

14 points by swaranga 3 days ago | 14 comments

708145_ 3 hours ago |

Lombok was never relevant, and using Jackson’s or other frameworks’ undesirable runtime sorcery does not make Lombok any more sound.

Adding a pile of annotations throughout your codebase, often five stacked on top of one another, which generate behavior that is not locally visible, was never a sane trade-off for saving a little boilerplate.

rootsudo 3 hours ago |

I’ve always been curious as to why Indonesia islands have been the naming convention for this sort of software for a long time.

It’s also funny because there is true irl “dark magic” for Java, Lombok and Bali.

Also surprised there isn’t much mention of Bali in general.

EdwardDiego 2 hours ago | |

Well, cos Java, while they named it for coffee, hence coffee related projects (Correto, Caffeine, and of course, all them goddamned Spring Beans) also being the name of the most densely populated island of Indonesia lead to related projects being named in an Indonesian theme like, obviously, Lombok, but Batik (an Indonesian tapestry form), Jakarta (largest city in Indonesia and on Java), IBM Semeru (the highest mountain on Java) , Apache Wayang (wayang is a traditional form of theatre in Indonesia and Malaysia), Project Sumatra etc. etc. etc.

compsciphd 52 minutes ago | | |

and don't forget projects like eclipse and an internal ibm effort called sunset that should give an idea of what part of their points were.

Randgalt 3 days ago |

Quality of life libraries like Lombok (or my library https://github.com/Randgalt/record-builder) are now anachronisms. Agents don’t need libraries to avoid writing getters, setters, etc. Lombok et al are for humans and the days of human coding are ending, sadly.

alex23478 51 minutes ago | |

they don't need it, but it surely saves some tokens since it just expresses the intention of the code in a denser way.

agents make dealing with boilerplate easier, but that doesn't change that boilerplate itself is just bad

cidd 4 hours ago | |

With that logic every library ever created is now anachronism. Agent can just always code using standard library of the programming language.

h05sz487b 1 hour ago | | |

Maybe that's not a bad idea.

swaranga 3 days ago | |

Lots to agree; I am certainly feeling it these days. I used to be excited for new language features (records, pattern matching) but I was looking at the recently posted Devoxx conference talks on Youtube and for every one of these, I was thinking "what's the point? The code will be written by an agent anyway".

Lewton 2 hours ago |

Lombok fucking sucks

@requiredargs sucks, if you rearrange the order of two fields with the same type on a class you invisibly break the code. If you have multiple constructors (requiredargs, allargs) it makes tracing how they’re used using the built in tools of your IDE impossible

@builder fucking sucks, if there’s non-nullable fields and you don’t set them, at best you get a runtime exception. Builder pattern should take non-null args explicitly in the builder() method so when you add a new required field it doesn’t invisibly break code 8 modules away

Only good thing is indeed the log annotation, and to some degree @getter @setter, big whoop

TheChaplain 44 minutes ago | |

If you don't like it then don't use it and carry on. No need to litter the world with such negativity.

jen20 4 hours ago |

This article does less to convince me that Lombok is worthwhile and more that Java (the language, not the JVM) is not.

EdwardDiego 2 hours ago | |

Modern Java is bloody great. Lombok is, IMO, an artefact of the years of Sun neglect of Java the language, a workaround.

And I say this as someone who has been writing Python for a living for the past 4 years who rather misses Java and the ecosystem.

zaphirplane 2 hours ago | |

Strange, Why is Java not relevant? its just a language with a massive 3rd party oss libraries and frameworks

SillyUsername 48 minutes ago | | |

It's a language that tries to be everything but is at its heart Enterprise software.

e.g. poor support, or late support for

- JWT/Swing desktop UIs

- Web technologies (it used to have a built in JS engine, competing standards, servlets, jsps, jstl, portlets)

- Image processing (ImageIO is limited, Image and BufferedImage were slow)

- Native interop (overlapping / competing standards)

- RPC (CORBA, Jini...)

- Mobile variants (J2ME, Java Profile Variants, Embedded Java, Java card)

- Threads, Concurrency, native threads (confusing so many re-implementations)

- Delegates, sorry I mean arrow functions, oops no I mean lambdas. The features Sun said should not be in the language for years then back pedalled once it realised the foot gun calling out Microsoft for them.

So many attempts at relevance then abandoned, left in the language as cruft, or just ideas that were vehemently not Java, shoe horned in.

And they still don't have the Elvis operator, not for lack of trying though, they do have the abomination Optional instead though, but best practice says DON'T use that for arguments, just return types (but the language permits it anyway).

For newbies, Python is better, Typescript is more accessible for web or serverless, Rust for native...