Well that's an anachronism, and no mistake

I'm installing the beta of Office 2010 (solves my problem of not being able to get a decent, gratis office suite, at least until November of next year). Check out the icon for the installer though - anachronistic in so many ways ... 16 bit colour, CRT monitor, boxed software, floppy disks (I mean, c'mon, FLOPPY DISKS?). I know its a standard, long running installer icon, but you'd think they could have found a more modern one. Just saying.

Little annoyances in Java

I have a couple proposals for some syntactic sugar in Java, that fix a bunch of minor annoyances.

1. Make Map iterable.
   That is, Map<K,V> should extend Iterable<Map.Entry<K,V>>, such that Map.iterator() behaves exactly like Map.entrySet().iterator() - it would save the extra ".entrySet()" in all those for-each loops, as well as making it easier to switch data structures from a List or Set to a Map.


2. Speaking of for-each loops, they should check for null in their iterable part. It lets you replace this code:

   Iterable<E> collection = methodThatMayReturnNull();
   if (collection != null) {
   for (E element : collection) {
   //do stuff ...
   }
   }

   with this, which seems to be sensible and much cleaner:

   for (E element : methodThatMayReturnNull()) {
   //do stuff ...
   }