Why should I use “functional operations” instead of a for loop?

Question

for (Canvas canvas : list) {
}

NetBeans suggests me to use "functional operations":

list.stream().forEach((canvas) -> {
});

But why is this preferred? If anything, it is harder to read and understand. You are calling stream(), then forEach() using a lambda expression with parameter canvas. I don't see how is that any nicer than the for loop in the first snippet.

Obviously I am speaking out of aesthetics only. Perhaps there is a technical advantage here that I am missing. What is it? Why should I use the second method instead?

Answer 1

Streams provide much better abstraction for composition of different operations you want to do on top of collections or streams of data coming in. Especially when you need to map elements, filter and convert them.

Your example is not very practical. Consider the following code from Oracle site.

List<Transaction> groceryTransactions = new Arraylist<>();
for(Transaction t: transactions){
  if(t.getType() == Transaction.GROCERY){
    groceryTransactions.add(t);
  }
}
Collections.sort(groceryTransactions, new Comparator(){
  public int compare(Transaction t1, Transaction t2){
    return t2.getValue().compareTo(t1.getValue());
  }
});
List<Integer> transactionIds = new ArrayList<>();
for(Transaction t: groceryTransactions){
  transactionsIds.add(t.getId());
}

can be written using streams:

List<Integer> transactionsIds = 
    transactions.stream()
                .filter(t -> t.getType() == Transaction.GROCERY)
                .sorted(comparing(Transaction::getValue).reversed())
                .map(Transaction::getId)
                .collect(toList());

The second option is much more readable. So when you have nested loops or various loops doing partial processing, it's very good candidate for Streams/Lambda API usage.

Answer 2

Another advantage of using the functional streaming API is, that it hides implementation details. It only describes what should be done, not how. This advantage becomes obvious when looking at the change that needs to be done, to change from single threaded to parallel code execution. Just change the .stream() to .parallelStream().

Answer 3

If anything, it is harder to read and understand.

That is highly subjective. I find the second version much easier to read and understand. It matches how other languages (e.g. Ruby, Smalltalk, Clojure, Io, Ioke, Seph) do it, it requires fewer concepts to understand (it's just a normal method call like any other, whereas the first example is specialized syntax).

If anything, it's a matter of familiarity.