this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
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Programming
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I'm not looking to argue about the importance of my points. I wouldn't have listed so many in that case.
The point I'm trying to make is that this is a very incomplete article, as it doesn't seem that much thought was put on the downsides.
A good article would've considered every angle. And so would probably conclude (if it had a conclusion) that the premise is incorrect, and the world of language design is more nuanced than "having both modifiers and annotations is bad language design".
And at that point, the article would've probably ended up being: when should annotations be used instead of modifiers?
Many of the most popular languages have both modifiers and annotations:
C doesn't have both because it doesn't even have annotations. Idk about C++, but it either doesn't have annotations (like C) or it should be in the list above
All of those have been heavily criticized from a language design PoV. And I've never seen anyone complain about this. People genuinely don't believe this to be an issue.
The closest is
public static int main()for java. But making them annotations would not fix that, only rearrange the issue vertically.I could mentioned additional points in favor for the same reason you mentioned your points against, but at some point one has to stop and decide whether any minor, additional points made would sway the overall verdict.
I have a separate blog post in which I consider when "popularity" or "familiarity" should be considered when it comes to language design.
If you look at Java-inspired languages like Scala or Kotlin, neither of them have
public(made the default) norstatic(replaced by companion objects).