[Building Sakai] Lombok Annotations

[csev]

On Sep 7, 2010, at 3:13 PM, Earle Nietzel wrote:

> If it's just because you don't like looking at all the code then you can use things like folding in eclipse. Also remember that if you had some problem in any auto generated code there is another level of complexity that has been added. IMHO the door swings both ways so to me it makes sense having libraries like lombok since those who choose to use it can and those who don't are happy as well.

Actually there *is* a significant difference - it is not about code folding - although IDEs not wasting my screen space is much appreciated.

For me the much larger issue with lots of boilerplate managed by the IDE is the fact that you really never know if the 20+ lines of code are there to be generic getters and setters - or are they because of some quite important value add or subtle logic.

It means that when you have 10 data elements, 9 with generic setters and getters and one with an explicit setter and getter - it draws a lot more attention to the one non-generic one - so code understanding is greatly enhanced.

Also, when you delete or change something there is less chance cruft will be there.  And yes *some* IDEs help here - but not all IDEs are the same - and it does take someone going through and opening files to "look for cruft".

At some gross level, the more lines that we are dragging around, the more chance we have for bugs.

Its kind of funny - people bend OO in all sorts of crazy ways to inherit code bits to avoid making more than one copy - and yet those same folks are perfectly happy when 15% of the code base is the same little three-line pattern over and over and over pasted in by some automated IDE.  Kinda ironic.

/Chuck