Java8 Lambdas Hacking to Groovy

2014-01-20

Last week, I joined a meetup with Hermes in Nivelles for an online Java 8 Lambda Hacking live stream event with Brian Goetz.

It was about time Java introduced lambda expressions. I’ve been developing in Groovy for a while and the switch to Java is always painful. But it’s much better now.

I took the opportunity to redo the Java 8 lab exercises in Groovy, and I was surprised to see the Java syntax can be expressive. In some more involved cases, I would argue Java is even more expressive than Groovy. Yes, really.

So, is Java grooving now? Check out the code and see for yourself.

// Exercise 8:
// Create a list containing the words, lowercased, in alphabetical order.

@Test
void sortedLowerCase() {
    List<String> words = reader
            .iterator()
            .collect {line -> line.split("\\W+")}
            .flatten()
            .collect {word -> word.toLowerCase()}
            .findAll {word -> !word.isEmpty()}
            .sort()
    ...
}