I have this answer on programmers.stackexchange.com which, at the time of writing these words, has 5 upvotes and 10 downvotes, and in all likelihood it will continue collecting downvotes, while I adamantly refuse to remove it, standing 100% by my ideas. I am dumbfounded, as such a thing has never happened before.

Here is the programmers.stackexchange.com question:

Is it okay to have objects that cast themselves, even if it pollutes the API of their subclasses?

I have a base class, Base. It has two subclasses, Sub1 and Sub2. Each subclass has some additional methods. For example, Sub1 has Sandwich makeASandwich(Ingredients... ingredients), and Sub2 has boolean contactAliens(Frequency onFrequency).

Since these methods take different parameters and do entirely different things, they're completely incompatible, and I can't just use polymorphism to solve this problem.

Base provides most of the functionality, and I have a large collection of Base objects. However, all Base objects are either a Sub1 or a Sub2, and sometimes I need to know which they are.

It seems like a bad idea to do the following:

for (Base base : bases) {
    if (base instanceof Sub1) {
        ((Sub1) base).makeASandwich(getRandomIngredients());
        // ... etc.
    } else { // must be Sub2
        ((Sub2) base).contactAliens(getFrequency());
        // ... etc.
    }
}

So I came up with a strategy to avoid this without casting. Base now has these methods:

boolean isSub1();
Sub1 asSub1();
Sub2 asSub2();

And of course, Sub1 implements these methods as

boolean isSub1() { return true; }
Sub1 asSub1();   { return this; }
Sub2 asSub2();   { throw new IllegalStateException(); }

And Sub2 implements them in the opposite way.

Unfortunately, now Sub1 and Sub2 have these methods in their own API. So I can do this, for example, on Sub1.

/** no need to use this if object is known to be Sub1 */
@Deprecated
boolean isSub1() { return true; }
/** no need to use this if object is known to be Sub1 */
@Deprecated
Sub1 asSub1();   { return this; }
/** no need to use this if object is known to be Sub1 */
@Deprecated
Sub2 asSub2();   { throw new IllegalStateException(); }

This way, if the object is known to be only a Base, these methods are un-deprecated, and can be used to "cast" itself to a different type so I can invoke the subclass's methods on it. This seems elegant to me in a way, but on the other hand, I'm kind of abusing Deprecated annotations as a way to "remove" methods from a class.

Since a Sub1 instance really is a Base, it does make sense to use inheritance rather than encapsulation. Is what I'm doing good? Is there a better way to solve this problem?

Tags: java, inheritance, type-casting

asked by codebreaker

This article started as a stackoverflow answer, and then I copied it over here to expand on it.

For a discussion of the same issue but in java-oriented terms, see this Stack Overflow answer of mine: Is overriding Object.finalize() really bad? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/288724/41811

There is this practice which is unfortunately very prevalent in the C# world, of implementing object disposal using the ugly, clunky, inelegant, ill-conceived, and error prone idiom known as IDisposable-disposing. MSDN describes it in length, and lots of people swear by it, follow it religiously, write walls of text discussing precisely how it should be done and precisely how it works, and precisely how they arrived at this particular way of doing it, etc.

(Please note that what I am calling ugly here is not the object disposal pattern itself; what I am calling ugly is the particular idiom of implementing an extra Dispose method with a bool disposing parameter.)

This idiom was invented under the assumption that the invocation of IDisposable.Dispose() is something optional, or in any case something which might be OK to forget, in combination with the fact that it is impossible to guarantee that our objects' destructor will always be invoked by the garbage collector to clean up resources. So, people tend to make their best effort to invoke their IDisposable.Dispose() methods, and in case they forget, they also give it one more try from within the destructor. You know, just in case.

These two side-by-side screen captures are from CrystalDiskMark measuring the performance of my brand new Samsung 850 PRO 256GB Solid State Drive (C:) versus the performance of my old Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache Hard Disk Drive (D:). Higher numbers are better.

Both devices are capable of SATA III, but my machine only has SATA II. Under SATA III, I would expect the HDD to perform somewhat faster, but the SSD to perform a lot faster. I will update this post when I upgrade to SATA III.

As a developer, I have configured MySQL to launch automatically at startup, because I will probably be using it, if this is a workday, and if my computer is starting up during work hours, and if my work these days involves databases. That's a lot of ifs. Quite often, I launch it but do not use it, so, it would be nice if it is as unobtrusive as possible. Unfortunately, it is obtrusive in at least one way: it occupies a large amount of memory, which is unreasonably large for a piece of software that is just sitting there doing nothing.

In this post I show how to configure it to occupy as little memory as possible.

Old comments

• Nat 2015-02-16 14:12:53 UTC

  Hey Michael, do you have a contact email? I'd like to run a few things by you but I can't seem to find any contact details.

  • michael.gr 2015-02-16 14:39:37 UTC

    Okay, I guess I need to fix that. I suppose I should post a picture containing my email address on the blog. In the mean time, you can contact me by sending an email to any address at this domain.

    Read more »

This post does not contain any spoilers, unless you would consider as a spoiler my opinion on how the quality if the movie varies as the movie progresses. (Or the image below.)

Picture source: cgmeetup.com

So, I watched The Dawn of the Planet of the Apes yesterday, and what can I say, wow, it blew my mind. I started watching it having very low expectations, and I was very pleasantly surprised for about one hour and fifty minutes of its total two hour and ten minute duration, which includes the end titles. Then, starting with the "I am saving the human race" incident, it transformed into the crap that I had expected from the beginning, perhaps even worse, but that does not annul the fact that the first one hour and fifty minutes were one of the most pleasant movie watching experiences I have had in quite some time.