Safe navigation operator

[Brian Goetz]

Yes, of course it has been discussed before — many, many times.  

As a language feature, it clears the already-high bar of “not a dumb idea.”  (You’d be surprised at what percentage of proposed features do not clear this bar.)  So, I hear you ask, then why haven’t we done it already?  Because even the not-dumb ideas have to clear a much higher bar to get into the language.  And there are many reasons why we might not, even though other languages have demonstrated that it is a workable and arguably useful feature.  

(If you are under the impression that this is a “small tweak”, please delete that notion from your head now :)  

One reason why I would not consider this feature at this point is that it is useless if the type of the field being referenced is a primitive; in order to make this feature not do something silly at this point, we’d need nullable primitives types (`int?`).  C# went this way, and its a valid way, but it’s not a small tweak.  

I think  your main argument is “a lot of people like it.”  Which is true.  Which is to say, it has a benefit.  But we cannot possibly do every feature that has a nonzero benefit; even if the costs were zero (which they are not), the complexity of the language would explode.  So we have to make these decisions on the basis of evaluating whether a given feature offers us the best return on effort, cost, and complexity.  

I think this is an OK feature, but I would rather spend my budget on pattern matching, records, value types, and specialized generics.  

Hope this helps,
-Brian



> On Jan 16, 2019, at 10:13 AM, Jeyvison Nascimento <jeynoronha at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Folks :)
> 
> Not sure if this is the best mail list to start it but I'd like to start a
> discussion about safe navigation operator (i.e "?." in Kotlin) in java.
> 
> Not sure if this was already talked about but if it wasn't I think it's
> something worth to investigate and explore.
> 
> What do you people think about it?
> 
> -- 
> Jeyvison Nascimento