Generics

Generics have one thing in common with regular expressions: Students think they are an easy to use tool but they just end up with code they do not understand and can’t maintain. Regular expressions can often be replaced by well written and documented code. But you can’t just replace generics. A student using collections with generic type parameters but not fully understanding the concept is still better than one using “raw” collections. And it’s often ok to use something just to get familiar with the idea before learning the theory. The downside is that many misconceptions emerge from this approach of teaching. In this post I try to explain some of the common misconceptions on generics in Java.

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Multiset in Java

Here’s an implementation of a multiset in Java 8. It uses a Map<T, Integer> to count how many times an object was inserted (multiplicity). It is not thread-safe, but there’s synchronizedMultiset(...) and it always knows the current size in O(1). With the method asMap() you can get a view of the multiset as a Map, that will allow modification of the underlying multiset.

The code is on GitHub: github.com/claudemartin/multiset

This started as a simple implementation and is not rather complex. The iterator allows to remove elements during iteration. I tried to write my own Spliterator, but it wasn’t faster than the default implementaion. Many methods are optimized and I added some set operations for multisets (union, intersect, minus). With merge(...) you can merge two multisets with any operation.

Fork/Join with non-recursive Task

Most tutorials use some recursive Task to calculate a Fibonacci number or something similar. This leads to the false impression that Fork/Join can only handle recursive Tasks (e.g. Divide-And-Conquer). Here’s a very simple example of a non-recursive Task.

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