Java Magazine, September/October 2016
Appreciating Limited Choice in Languages The more prescriptive a language is in the details the easier it is to code productively Our coverage of JDK Enhancement Proposals JEPs in this issue examines a recent proposal to standardize the syntax of command line arguments for tools that ship in the JDK As the proposal points out in support of its core concern presently there are multiple ways of asking for help from the command line And if you happen to guess wrong when using a given tool you need to circle through the variety of possibilities These can vary from help to help to And then theres the unmentioned last resort which is to run the program with no arguments and see what kind of information you get in the error message I wholly support this standardization but Id go much further In my view the syntax of ORACLE COM JAVAMAGAZINE SEPTEMBER OCTOBER 2016 04 from the editor PHOTOGRAPH BY BOB ADLER GETTY IMAGES command line switches should be included in style guides for the language If the Java team had specified a standard convention for switches when it released the language in the same way that it recommended initial capitals for class names and all capitals for constants this small annoyance would not exist The more a language can formalize small details the easier it is to get things done But in an ideal world even this solution is insufficient I strongly believe that the abundance of Java style guides is itself a limitation Id far prefer that there be one consistent set of recommendations that was universally followed For example writing out definitive guidelines for the Java in the Cloud Oracle Cloud delivers high performance and battle tested platform and infrastructure services for the most demanding Java apps Oracle Cloud Built for modern app dev Built for you Start here developer oracle com developersrule
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