My ten-year quest for concise lambda expressions in Java

I started learning Java in 1997. I thought initially Java would be a fad and that Smalltalk would emerge as the victor in the battle for object-oriented programmer productivity over C++. I was wrong. In the great object-oriented battles in the 1990s between C++ and Smalltalk, Java emerged as the victor. Y2K marked the end of my career as a professional Smalltalk developer. I stopped programming in Smalltalk professionally for the promise of a higher-paying career in Java. Over two decades later, this would turn out to be the best decision I ever made in my career. I miss Smalltalk, but it’s never too far away from my keyboard. My journey with Java has helped me evolve as a software engineer, learner, and teacher. I know things now that if I had continued programming professionally in Smalltalk, I might have never had the opportunity to learn and share with so many other developers. My Smalltalk experience gave me a solid perspective on what Java was missing. This knowledge and experience created a great opportunity for me to become a teacher, and to learn things more deeply as a result. Teaching a Smalltalk way of thinking to thousands of Java developers globally has enabled me to achieve a higher level of appreciation for many things. I have helped many Java developers learn how to elevate their coding style so they can communicate their intent with a more expressive vocabulary. I’ve seen quite a few developers build great things with the skills they have developed. This is everything to me. In the rest of this blog, I will explain how a dislike for reading and writing for loops became so acute that it led to me creating an open-source collections library (<a href="https://github.com/eclipse/eclipse-collections" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Eclipse Collections</a>) for Java inspired by Smalltalk. This then set me on a quest to find a way to help Java get good syntactical support for concise lambda expressions. <h1>Hold the for</h1> I dislike reading for loops in application code. I see for loops as a sign that a developer failed to learn and use a higher level abstraction to communicate what they are doing with an intention revealing name. For loops are a necessity in languages like Java. With the minimal interface design approach of Java Collections, the for loop became the “Hodor” of developer communication. For anyone who hasn’t heard of “Hodor”, he is a character in the “Game of Thones” series who says only one word: Hodor! I will refer to the style of programming where all iteration patterns are written with for loops as Hofor! <a href="https://betterprogramming.pub/my-ten-year-quest-for-concise-lambda-expressions-in-java-39fde576b950">Website</a>