"A world without String is Chaos"
(remember this from Mouse Hunt?)
My turn: "A language with befuddling support for String is annoying" :)
Java is not a pure object-oriented language, mostly the impurity comes from the primitive type support. Although primitive types provide fast access and readability, however mixing them with their OOP counterparts is always frustrating. Same goes with C#.
The most annoying bit is the support for String. String is not a primitive type in Java nor was it supported in C++, you would have to create your own char array or use the STL's std::string. Yet there is special support in the language to give it the primitive feel. You can write:
String str = "String object";
String str2 = "this is not a String object but converted to one by the language" + str;
String str3 = "most annoying of all, you could use String's methods on this".toUpperCase();
As the last statement demonstrates, you could even call methods upon this non-standard object while you cannot do the same with other primitive types. Same thing could have been done with an integer literal (int) by providing Integer's methods upon it.
These dual standards are evil and confusing creating doubts about the authenticity of the language.
I'm loving Scala these days, it's stance on these dissimilarities created by Java and C# by providing us the all new and improved data types in the scala package.
Uptill now I have only but one grudge with Scala and that is the Scala's Strings refer to the one in java.lang.String package rather than providing us an improved version of it in the scala package.
Martin Odersky, please do something about it!
Three years ago, yes i think it's been 3-4 years since dipping my fingers in the world of Functional Programming. Although XSLT is not a functional language but it strives to follow the FP guidelines and it is the weapon that I hold responsible for my First (FP) Blood.
I started using XSLT in .net, producing result sets in XML and writing XSLs for the visually appealing transformations. First it was simple if-else, for-each, using XQuery etc. but as soon as I stumbled upon variable assignment, I thought I caught a bug in XSLT, "I cannot reassign a variable, what's the use of the VARYiable then?"
Then I tried writing a for loop from a to b, I was troubled again. Soon I realized there was something different going on here and I would have to learn it properly before calling XSLT my preferred transformation language. At that time I read about functional language, which uptil then I thought was another name for procedural language. Satisfied, I went ahead with XSLT using recursion, template calling etc. techniques that were already taught to me but as an alternative to normal programming construct and not as a measure to make out of reassignment restrictions.
After that I forgot about FP and went on with life, rejoicing references, reassignments, reflection and then I heard about closures (around a year and a half ago) and people talking about forcing it somehow in the beautiful, simple, verbose Java language. At that time, I could not get a hang of it and went on with life. Then came the Scala buzz, I was always a great advocate of static typing and Scala being termed as the 'statically typed dynamic language' attracted me. After some days of learning I came to know about the FP fundamentals, side-effects, currying, closures etc. aside from being refreshing, these concepts enabled me to realize the modularization of functional behavior, an essential requirement in a good design that no OOP design pattern has been able to solve in a concise manner.
