Tempers Erupt at Conference: Multi-Line Strings in Java

CodeToJoy Newswire
Satire City, CA
Jan 30, 2008

At a recent Java conference, tempers flared and developers ultimately took to the streets in protest over a controversial feature proposed for Java 7.

Prior to the conference, the proposition of multi-line string literals seemed benign: the concept is not new, and is found in many languages. An example:

String thePoint = """
i still
love
java""";

Unfortunately, the issue exposed deep philosophical divisions within the Java community, and civic unrest ensued.

The School of Grafters

At the main presentation, one academic group pitched their proposal for multi-line string literals. Their thesis:

• "In another thirty years people will laugh at anyone who tries to invent a language without multi-line strings."
  
• This new feature will free programs of much of their accidental concatenationicity.
  
• Multi-line strings can be seamlessly woven/grafted into the language, without an extension to the existing Java type system.
  

Though the other speakers showed signs of dissent, the presentation went well until the final point:

• The implementation of multi-line strings could be a straight-forward application of Generics.

At this point, the crowd began to shift uneasily and talk amongst themselves. Several presenters from the panel began to openly question the proposal. Finally, after a moment of chaos, the moderator brought the segment to a close, and introduced the next speaker.

The Block Camp

From the outset, it was clear that this group was more conservative, and desired to block the proposition. The presenter made the following points:

• The usage of multi-line strings will encourage an exotic style of string concatenation, possibly fostering dialects and hindering string portability.
• A new feature should have a minimal addition to the lexical surface area: surely the + symbol has a higher power-to-weight ratio than """.

Again, the speaker was persuading the audience until the final point:

• James Gosling wrote, circa 1997, that Java is a "blue collar language" which modestly gets the job done. It's practical, not theoretical!
  

At this point, an audience member yelled, questioning a rumor that Gosling was a member of the School of Grafters. Another asked what Gosling thought of the issue in 2008 (versus 1997). Chaos threatened to erupt again, until security guards ominously appeared at the door of the auditorium.

The Junkies and Dead-ends

Finally, the last speaker on the panel walked to the podium. In a quiet voice, he confessed that he was a feature junkie and that he represented a group of developers who were irrationally drawn to new features such as multi-line strings. He described the inner turmoil of being a junkie: living with both feature lust and also the burden of backward compatibility. His only solace was to consider Java a dead-end with respect to new features.

It was a tender moment, until his conclusion:

What's the big deal anyway? Why not use multi-line strings in Scala, compile the code down to bytecode, and just use that?

At this point, the crowd erupted for the final time, streaming past the guards, and spilling into the streets. Soon, they carried placards and bull-horns, appealing for unity.

The mob protested for several hours until, finally, local police brought in staff from JetBrains to hand out free IntelliJ licenses.