This started long before Oracle and the favouring of verbose, ritualistic boiler code was set back at Sun. James Gosling has been staunchly against overloading operators, properties and value types (almost out of spite from Microsoft's success with providing this in C#), the aftermath of which the language and run-time still struggle today and forever will. It's unfortunate that the original inventor, while a brilliant programmer himself, thought so little of others that such features were not to be included, because other programmers might mess up their use.