Implementing Scala-like Pattern Matching in Java 8
I’ve been writing Scala off and on for the last several years. I took both of the Scala courses on Coursera and really enjoyed them. However, I still write a lot of Java. There are a lot of Scala features that I miss while working with Java, and as Java 8 was coming out in early 2014, I thought about feature parity between the two languages. The addition of lambdas to Java is great, but one of my favorite features of Scala is pattern matching, and Java 8 does not include that. At the time I started to wonder if pattern matching could be implemented as a Java library. I wasn’t sure if it would even be possible, but I wrote up a quick Github gist with what some different patterns might look like.