Disclaimer: I have written one Java program in my career, (although I have read quite a few).

Take this personal mistake that I made in a critical data path as an example:

  for (int i<0; i< array.size(); i++) {
    String result = "PR-" + array[i] + "-RD";
    file.write(result);
  }
[download]

I can safely say I wouldn't have made the i < array.size() error. I've seen this enough in various other languages to know to hoist the function call out of the loop construct.

On the other hand, I'm pretty aghast at the way Java forces you to deal with string concatenation. There is always a trade-off between language purity and getting the job done. The Proper Way to do in Java is one that you are unlikely to determine all by yourself, even if you saw it in someone else's code.

It seems to me that the Java language designers went too far down the purity route, rather than having the compiler do the right thing for you. That's not the best use of costly human time. Make the compiler do the grunt work. Even in C++, an awful lot of effort has gone into building compilers that optimise away intermediate copy constructors and what not. I am surprised that Java compilers are not up to the level that C++ compilers were any number of years ago.

g r i n d e r