static methods make Java a pseudo functional language?

Question

I've been mulling about a post by Misko Hevery that static methods in Java are a death to testability. I don't want to discuss the testability issue but more on the concept of static methods. Why do people hate it so much?

It's true that we don't have closures (but we have a slightly awkward anonymous functions), lambdas & functions as first class objects. In a way, I think static methods can be used to mimic functions as first class objects.

Answer 1

Static methods make testing hard because they can't be replaced, it's as simple as that.

How can static methods "mimic" functions as first class objects¹? Arguably they're worse than anything else on this front. You can "mimic" functions as first class objects by creating single-method interfaces, and indeed Google's Java Collections does exactly this in a number of places (for predicates, projections etc). That can't be done with static methods - there's no way (other than with reflection) to pass the concept of "when you want to apply a function, use this method.

No, I can't see how static methods help here. They discourage state-changing (as the only state available is the global state and any mutable state passed in via the parameters) but they don't help on the "functions as first class objects" side.

C# has better support for this (with lambda expressions and delegates) but even that's not as general as it might be. (Compare it with F#, for example.)

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¹ As of Java 8, method references will allow methods to be converted to instances of appropriate single-method interfaces, which will make all of this more relevant. Back in 2009 that was a long way off though...

Answer 2

One characteristic of functional programming is immutability of data. static does imply that you don't need an object (instance) representing state, so that's not a bad start. You do however have state on the class level, but you can make this final. Since (static) methods aren't first-class functions at all, you will still need ugly constructions like anonymous classes to approach a certain style of functional programming in Java.

FP is best done in an functional language, since it has the necessary language support for things like higher-order functions, immutability, referential transparency and so on.

However, this does not mean that you can't program in a functional style in an imperative language like Java. Other examples can be given as well. It's not because you are programming in Java that you are doing OOP. You can program with global data and unstructured control flows (goto) in a structured language as C++. I can do OOP in a functional language like Scheme. Etc.

Steve McConnell mentions the difference of programming in a language versus programming into a language in Code Complete (also a very popular reference on SO).

So, in short, if you say that "static methods mimic first-class functions", I do not agree.

If, however, and I think that this was more the point you were trying to get across, you would say that "static methods can help for programming in a functional style in Java", I agree.