Primitive streams and optional

[Tim Peierls]

On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 4:05 PM, Doug Lea <dl at cs.oswego.edu> wrote:

> Or in other words, they will appear to be anomalous only to those

people who people who do map.put(null, null) and the like. And my
> basic point is that catering to them causes not only API complexity
> but also conceptual complexity.


I'll put in one last plea for Optional-style returns from methods that
might not have a return value, like findFirst: Firstly, I've never advanced
OptionalXxx as a way to cater to people who do map.put(null, null). Those
are not my peeps, and I wouldn't want to break bread with them, let alone
cater to them.

Secondly, Optional *decreases *API complexity -- fewer methods in the
interfaces -- and while it might indeed increase conceptual complexity
(slightly), it mostly eliminates a large class of user errors (it has for
me!). I think that's well worth the extra object creation at the end of a
pipeline. And I think concerns about monstrosities like
Optional<Optional<X>> are overblown -- it's not going to happen in any API
that hopes to have users.

--tim