Extension methods

[Ron Pressler]

> On 23 Apr 2024, at 15:57, ІП-24 Олександр Ротань <rotan.olexandr at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Community craves for it and asks all the time, and I'm sure If it was proposed as JEP it will be gladly accepted by Java devs. As for me, that's the most important thing, not decisions that hand been made a long time ago in the past.

First, the most important thing is to increase the value Java has overall, which does not necessarily always coincide with what developers say they want (e.g. developers rarely ask for security features and often oppose security improvements, while if you look at the value such features create — by avoiding damage — you’ll see they are sometimes among the most valuable features). Second, there is a big difference between what you remember seeing some people ask for and what the majority want; this is somewhat similar to the difference between what you see people ask for in protests or in letter-writing campaigns and what the majority actually want. Java has achieved more success than the languages you named — perhaps more than all of them combined — and it wouldn’t have been that way for so long if we actually didn’t give our users what they need.

If you want to change the course of the platform rather than just voice your opinion — which is perfectly valid but contains no new information; as you can imagine, we hear opinions for or against things all the time and extension methods are old news indeed — try and report about problems you experience, not ask for features you wish Java had. Such reports carry actual signal, and their impact is huge. If I said that a single experience report has an impact on outcome of 50x that of a request or opinion it may be an *underestimate*.

If 1% of Java users were enthusiastic about extension methods, and 1% of that 1% wrote to us about it, it would be a thousand emails/social media posts, which would carry little information as it is a reasonable working hypothesis that for just about any feature you could find 1% who are excitedly in favour. On the other hand, an experience report from people doing different kinds of work with Java is more likely to contain some new information. As Brian likes to say, we want to learn what we don’t already know. If some feature is not on the roadmap, it will likely be put on the roadmap when we learn something new about the market.

— Ron