Lombok Is Still Relevant in the Age of Java Records

Lombok was never relevant, and using Jackson’s or other frameworks’ undesirable runtime sorcery does not make Lombok any more sound.

Adding a pile of annotations throughout your codebase, often five stacked on top of one another, which generate behavior that is not locally visible, was never a sane trade-off for saving a little boilerplate.

I’ve always been curious as to why Indonesia islands have been the naming convention for this sort of software for a long time.

It’s also funny because there is true irl “dark magic” for Java, Lombok and Bali.

Also surprised there isn’t much mention of Bali in general.

Quality of life libraries like Lombok (or my library https://github.com/Randgalt/record-builder) are now anachronisms. Agents don’t need libraries to avoid writing getters, setters, etc. Lombok et al are for humans and the days of human coding are ending, sadly.

Lombok fucking sucks

@requiredargs sucks, if you rearrange the order of two fields with the same type on a class you invisibly break the code. If you have multiple constructors (requiredargs, allargs) it makes tracing how they’re used using the built in tools of your IDE impossible

@builder fucking sucks, if there’s non-nullable fields and you don’t set them, at best you get a runtime exception. Builder pattern should take non-null args explicitly in the builder() method so when you add a new required field it doesn’t invisibly break code 8 modules away

Only good thing is indeed the log annotation, and to some degree @getter @setter, big whoop

This article does less to convince me that Lombok is worthwhile and more that Java (the language, not the JVM) is not.