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An anti-rant: I just made some code and out of nowhere it suddenly had an awesome feature that I didn't even program. No, not a euphemism for "bug", an actual feature.
Here's the story: A few months ago I made a shortcut for "System.out.println(…)" called "print(…)". Then I developed it further to also print arrays as "[1,2,3]", lists as "{1,2,3}", work with nested arrays and lists and accept multiple arguments.
Today I wanted to expand the list printing feature, which previously only worked for ArrayLists, to all types of List. That caused a few problems, but eventually I got it to work. Then I also wanted to expand it to all instances of Collection. As a first step, I replaced the two references to "List" with "Collection" and magically, no error message. So I tested it with this code:
HashMap<Integer, String> map = new HashMap<>();
map.put(1, "1");
map.put(2, "");
map.put(3, "a");
print(map);
And magic happened! The output was:
{1=1, 2=, 3=a}
That's awesome! I didn't even think yet about how I wanted to display key-value pairs, but Java already gave me the perfect solution. Now the next puzzle is where the space after the comma comes from, because I didn't program that in either.
I feel a bit like a character in "The subtle knife", who writes a barebones program to communicate with sentient elementary particles (believe me, it makes sense in context) and suddenly there's text alignment on the left and right, without that character having programmed any alignment.
rant
magic
java