I've recently been sitting down and relearning Java. Not good enough to be idiomatic in the language, but whatever. One of the first things I banged into was the unbelievably bad date/time libraries that are built in. After banging my head for a couple hours trying to figure out the magical combination of classes I needed to assemble to get a date formatter to work, I just ended up rolling my own in half an hour.

I'm frequently surprised at the really rough and inconvenient bits in Java. Weird inconsistencies in the libraries, or not having a really convenient set of file read/write methods without having to cobble together bits and pieces of an I/O system to get a directory listing or read in a file or whatever, or how variable performance is between two similar looking pieces of code (if you haven't done lots of benchmarking on Java standard library containers, I urge you to do it, and make careful selection of containers based on that, it's frequently surprising how different otherwise identical looking code runs).

Considering there are what, 3 complete GUI toolkits built in, why isn't there a built in CSV parsing library, or a "read file to string" static method somewhere? Why do I have to put so much effort into basic tasks? It's such a weird and uneven and sloppy feeling thing.

There's all these weird aggregated different ways to do the same thing, but each built to fix some problem with some older solution, but the older broken ways were never really deprecated out for compatibility. Unless you run across some guide that says explicitly "use this instead of this because of <reasons>" you might never know the newer version exists. Yet the new releases includes so much compatibility breaking new syntax changes that it doesn't practically matter.

There's bits and pieces of related but complete solutions piled all over the library as well. e.g. Regex bits are in String, java.util.regex.* (Pattern and Matcher) and probably elsewhere...and don't get me started if you're moving back and forth between arrays and the various containers that make arrays more usable, and then all the utilities to help with that which are scattered all over the place. I spend half my time writing code to abstract all that nonsense away so I can write the main code logic in peace.

And then over the years the concepts about how to design an API have changed or something, because you can feel different stylistic concepts in different places. Here you instantiate an object, then set it up, then build another object of this type to catch the results and do some other magic. Here you instantiate the object with all the important bits and manipulate the object with local methods. It's like each class requires it's own style guide. I can understand that with 3rd party work, but it doesn't make sense with the batteries that come with the language to be so uneven.

It was probably 10 years ago that I last tried Java, and it sucked back then, with all the verbosity etc. But with modern IDE support I actually kind of like the flow and style of it to some extent. It's a beautifully simple syntax to use at its core. But then again I don't care about all the FactoryFactory nonsense. And I'm avoiding lots of the new stuff that doesn't really fit into the language.

I've actually started to become convinced that it's getting to the point that Java 10 or whatever should be a single minded house cleaning. Jettison all the broken old shit, clean up the style and usage, build decent syntax into the language for doing common tasks so the coder doesn't have to boilerplate themselves to death. Take 5 years to do it, the enterprise will survive that long.

edit I wonder if the idea of an "API editor" to vet the interfaces for consistency and style in these large standard libraries makes sense?