Programmer Humor

Its standard library reads like someone's Object Oriented Programming 101 final project, and they probably got a B- for it. Everything works and follows OO principles, but they didn't stop to think about how it's actually going to be used.

Let's try to read a file line-by-line:

BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("sample.txt"));
String line = reader.readLine();

We're having to instantiate two objects (FileReader and then BufferedReader) just to get an object that has a readLine() method. Why? Can't BufferedReader take a file name on its own and work it out? Or FileReader just provides readLine() itself?

Not only that, but being parsimonious with what we import would result in:

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;

But we're much more likely to be lazy and import everything with import java.io.*;. Which is sloppy, but I understand.

I can see what they were thinking when separating these concerns, but it resulted in more complexity than necessary.

There's a concept of "Huffman Coding" in language design. The term itself comes from data compression, but it can be generalized to mean that things you do often in a programming language should be short and easy. The above is not good Huffman Coding.