Question

Syntactic sugar for properties for example in C#:

private int x;  public int X{     get { return x; }     set { x = value; } } 

or simply

 public int X{ get; set; } 

I am missing verbatim strings in java… @’C:\My Documents\’ instead of ‘C:\\My Documents\\’

Do you agree Java needs more ‘sugar’? Any one knows is there is sugar coming in next Java versions?

Answer 1

While I don’t necessarily agree with Java’s philosophy, I think that adding lots of syntactic sugar to Java would go against its philosophy. Java is supposed to be a very simple, easy to reason about language with few constructs, kind of a lowest common denominator lingua franca in the programming community. It was largely a reaction to the complexity of C++. There is supposed to be very little ‘magic’ in it, beyond what is needed (garbage collection, mostly) to make it a memory-safe language.

If you want more sugar, etc. in a reasonably high-performance, statically typed language, I would say that Java is just the wrong language for you. You’re probably better off just using C#, or maybe D.