Immutability

Using immutable types has a number of benefits. Since it eliminates mutation, it makes code easier to reason about. Also, it eliminates concurrent modification problems, thereby unlocking a lot of performance improvement opportunities. Java originally was fully Object-Oriented but it adapted to other paradigms. The language itself still lacks some features that makes it convenient to work with immutable data. In this post I’d like to show what can currently be done in vanilla Java and show a powerful concept to transform immutable data.

Writing code assuming everything will follow the happy path may not result in the best software quality or user experience. Sometimes we choose to ignore unhappy paths, or lack awareness of the existence of unhappy paths. Both of these scenarios can lead to runtime bugs and problems for customers which may be good to prevent.

Many strategies and coding styles exist in different languages to give the developer tools to address this issue. In this post I’d like to explore some of them and illustrate my preferences.